Charles Dickens
1) Oliver Twist
Author
Language
English
Description
Charles Dickens' classic story of a young boy who seeks his fortune on the streets of London. After Oliver Twist asks nasty Mr Bumble for more food, he has to flee the workhouse for the streets of London. Here he meets the Artful Dodger, who leads him to Fagin and his gang of pickpockets. When a thieving mission goes wrong, Oliver narrowly avoids prison and finds himself in the care of kind Mr Brownlow. But Fagin and the brutal Bill Sikes go in search...
Author
Language
English
Description
Old Ebenezer Scrooge is too mean to spend money on coals for the fire in his counting-house, where his clerk Bob Cratchit shivers in the winter cold. Declining an invitation to his nephew Fred's Christmas party, and refusing to give money to charity, he is ready for his usual miserly Christmas in his cold, dingy apartment. But that night, the ghost of his dead partner Jacob Marley appears and tells him to expect a visit from three spirits over the...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
When the starving French masses rise in hate to overthrow a corrupt and decadent government, both the guilty and innocent become victims of their frenzied anger. Soon nothing stands in the way of the chilling figure they enlist for their cause - La Guillotine - the new invention for efficiently chopping off heads.
Charles Dickens' compelling portrait of the results of terror and treason, love and supreme sacrifice continues to captivate readers around...
4) Bleak house
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
With their estate entangled in an interminable legal case, the young wards of the court Richard Carstone and Ada Clare are taken into the benevolent care of the kindly John Jarndyce. Ada's companion, the gentle and good-hearted Esther Summerson, is devoted to the old man and, although she loves another, becomes betrothed to him. But behind Esther's supposed orphan past lies a dark secret that leads tragically to deceit, blackmail and murder. And as...
Author
Language
English
Description
David Copperfield is considered to be Charles Dickens's most autobiographical novel. He said of it: "Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield." It is a Bildungsroman, a tale which follows the development into maturity of its narrator, David Copperfield. The Russian greats Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky both greatly admired the novel, as did Kafka, Joyce and James. Freud called it his favourite...
Author
Language
English
Description
As a small boy at Joe Gargery's forge, Pip meets two people who will affect his whole life - an escaped convict he is forced to help, and the eccentric Miss Haversham, whose beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella young Pip adores. But when a secret benefactor pays for him to go to London to become a gentleman, Pip never dreams he will meet the dreadful Magwitch again, nor just how wrong his expectations are.
Author
Language
English
Description
The story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness"; the mannish lawyer...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Of the complex, richly rewarding masterworks he wrote in the last decade of his life, Little Dorrit is the book in which Charles Dickens most fully unleashed his indignation at the fallen state of mid-Victorian society. Crammed with persons and incidents in whose recreation nothing is accidental or spurious, containing, in its picture of the Circumlocution Office, the most witheringly exact satire of a bureaucracy we possess, Little Dorrit is a stunning...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
When his father suddenly dies, Nicholas Nickleby is sent by his uncle to Dotheboys Hall to work as a teacher, but when Nicholas discovers that the headmaster, Wackford Squeers, maliciously bullies the students, he must decide whether to stay, or leave and allow his uncle to cut off support for his family.
12) Dombey and Son
Author
Language
English
Description
Introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallett Annotation. Dickens set this tale of a selfish, hard-hearted man, the son he favored, and the daughter he slighted, in an England almost prostrate before the storms of change we now call the Industrial Revolution. This is a superb example of Dicken's ability to combine the disparate qualities of a social historian, a theatrical artist, and a poet of the utmost tenderness and insight.
13) Hard times
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Set in Coketown, a fictional industrial town in the north of England, Hard Times was born of its author's indignation at the soul-crushing conditions of the industrial age, and yet it vibrantly transcends the stock situations and polemical weaknesses typical of social protest fiction of the time. The indelible characters-Mr. Gradgrind, whose utilitarian educational philosophy emotionally cripples his own children; the hypocritical factory owner Josiah...
Author
Language
English
Description
The Pickwick Papers was Dicken's response to his publisher's request for a monthly series of sporting sketches. It became the most famous of all pre-Victorian novels. The central characters, Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller, are as familiar today as they became on publication, and there are over a hundred other speaking parts. The action is set in the late Georgian perid of the writer's earliest youth, drawing on experience and acute observation ranging...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the mysterious Druids and noble King Alfred to the notorious Henry VIII and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Charles Dickens traced his country's history for the benefit of young Victorians. Written with the beloved storyteller's customary panache, this series of historical vignettes reads like a fast-paced novel, rich in anecdotes and colorful stories. Dickens' unsparing, witty, and opinionated perspectives on the great pageant of English history...
17) Barnaby Rudge
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Fully entitled "Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty," this novel was Dickens' first attempt at a historical novel. As such, it is the precursor to his more famous "A Tale of Two Cities", in which his exploration of mob violence, and especially the effect of public events on individual lives, becomes apparent. This work centers on Barnaby Rudge, a mentally simple son, and his loving mother, who are a part of the small village of Epping Forest,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The 'terrible mistake' was the contemporary utilitarian philosophy, expounded in Hard Times (1854) as the Philosophy of Fact by the hard-headed disciplinarian Thomas Gradgrind. But the novel, Dickens's shortest, is more than a polemical tract for the times; the tragic story of Louisa Gradgrind and her father is one of Dickens's triumphs. When Louisa, trapped in a loveless marriage, falls prey to an idle seducer, the crisis forces her father to reconsider...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain Charles Dickens - The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, A Fancy for Christmas-Time (better known as The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain or simply as The Haunted Man) is a novella by Charles Dickens first published in 1848. It is the fifth and last of Dickens's Christmas novellas. The story is more about the spirit of Christmas than about the holiday itself, harking back to the first in the series, A Christmas...