What would be your contender for greatest novel ever written? And why? I don't mean your favourite novel. And I don't mean the novel that cheers you up or comforts you, etc. I mean the novel you consider the best.
There are so many classics I've never read it's embarrassing. For example, I've never read Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, Middlemarch, Emma, Robinson Crusoe, Mrs Dalloway, 1984, Brideshead Revisited, Moby Dick, Catch 22, Madame Bovary, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, (I could go on and on). But based on the novels I have read, my vote would go to Dickens' David Copperfield. Pride and Prejudice, Kipling's Kim, Sons and Lovers, The Great Gatsby, etc, would fight it out for second place.
Plenty of novels have given me as much pleasure (Wodehouse's Right Ho Jeeves, for example), but nothing else seems so universal. D.H. Lawrence described the novel as "the bright book of life," and that's a perfect description of David Copperfield. Everything is there, the whole range of human experience. It opens with a beautiful description of childhood, and the way it becomes a lost paradise, and then covers pretty much every human experience, from the death of a parent to the infatuation of sexual love (and the disillusion that follows).
It also contains more characters than any novel I have ever read. And they are so vivid and real. I doubt there is any novel out there (with the possible exceptions of War and Peace and Proust's A La Recherche, neither of which I have read) with so many people and so many voices: Uriah Heep, Mr Micawber, Aunt Betsy, Mr Dick, Steerforth, Peggotty. Amazing. Most novelists can't create one memorable character. Dickens creates at least six in this novel alone.
I also admire the heart of the novel. Dickens rejects moral relativism, and re-affirms what we all, deep down, know is true – that kindness, loyalty, love, courage, dignity, etc, are good, and cruelty, bullying, sadism, betrayal, cowardice, etc, are bad.