Charles Dickens

An unknown benefactor supplies an orphaned blacksmith's apprentice with the means to be educated in London as a gentleman of "great expectations."

Scrooge, the miser, is reformed when visited on Christmas Eve by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.

Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape.
One of the most swiftly moving and unified of Charles Dickens’s great novels, Oliver Twist is also famous for its re-creation–through the splendidly realized figures of Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger,

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“Facts alone are wanted in life.” The children at Mr. Gradgrind’s school are sternly ordered to stifle their imaginations and pay attention only to cold, hard reality. The effects of Gradgrind’s teaching on his own children, Tom and Louisa, are particularly profound and leave them ill-equipped to deal with the unpredictable desires of the human heart. Luckily for them, they have a friend in Sissy Jupe, the child of a circus

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Beautiful, honest Nell Trent lives with her devoted Grandfather in his Old Curiosity Shop, an enchanting shop of odds and ends. Desperate to make a better life for his Nell, Grandfather secretly gambles and gets deeply into debt with the unscrupulous Quilp. When what little money they have is lost in a game of cards, Quilp claims The Old Curiosity Shop as payment for the loans

Released in installments from 1840 to 1841, Charles Dicken's The

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Tells the story of a poor orphan's adventures in the criminal underworld of mid-nineteenth-century London.

Nicholas, his mother, and his sister Kate have been left penniless by the death of Mr. Nickleby. In their poverty and desperation they seek help from Nicholas's uncle, the difficult and oppressive Ralph Nickleby who is a usurer. Nicholas's independent attitudes immediately bother his uncle and he is sent to Dotheboys Hall to teach. There he witnesses the mistreatment of orphans by the evil-hearted Wackford Squeers. Nicholas and the orphan boy, Smike,...

A miser learns the true meaning of Christmas when three ghostly visitors review his past and foretell his future. Illustrated notes throughout the text explain the historical background of the story.

What was it like to be Charles Dickens? His letters are the nearest we can get to a Dickens autobiography: vivid, close-up snapshots of a life lived at maximum intensity. This is the first selection to be made from the magisterial twelve-volume British Academy Pilgrim Edition, which contains over 14,000 of Dickens's letters. The 450 letters included here have been cherry-picked to give readers the best essence of the 'Sparkler of Albion' -- Jacket,...