Charles Dickens

When David Copperfield's widowed mother remarries, David suffers from his stepfather's abuse. At age 8, David is sent away to a harsh school where the principal routinely beats the students. David's circumstances become even worse when he is removed from school and, at age 10, forced to labor from morning to night in a London warehouse. David then decides to take desperate action. He will run away to his great-aunt, who lives in Dover. Having never...

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained...

The final novel by Charles Dickens, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood", was unfinished at the time of his death in 1870. The novel revolves around John Jasper, choirmaster and opium addict, who is the guardian of his orphaned nephew Edwin Drood. Before the death of his parents, Edwin was promised to marry Rosa Bud, another orphan, but their affections have cooled upon reaching adulthood. Rosa has also attracted the affections of Jasper, her teacher, as...

"Ebenezer Scrooge is a penny-pinching, mean, old miser. He treats his family and employee poorly, and, in turn, is not a well-liked man. He especially does not like Christmas! But, one fateful Christmas Eve, he is visited by three ghosts that change his life forever!" -- Page [4] of cover.

The novel "Little Dorrit", published originally between 1855 and 1857, is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period. Much of Dickens' ire is focused upon the institutions of debtor's prisons-in which people who owed money were imprisoned, unable to work, until they have repaid their debts. The representative prison in this case is the Marshalsea where the author's own father had been imprisoned. Most of Dickens'...

Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

Charles Dickens was an English short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and the most popular novelist to come out of the Victorian era. Many of his novels, with their frequent concern for social reform, were first published in magazines in serial form under the pseudonym, Boz. Unlike authors who completed entire novels before serialization, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The continuing popularity of his novels and...

Dive into the dark and pulsating streets of Victorian England with Charles Dickens' timeless masterpiece, "Oliver Twist." Follow the captivating destiny of Oliver Twist, a brave young orphan, as he confronts the injustice, poverty, and cruelty of the world around him. Oliver, mistreated in an orphanage, escapes to London where he becomes entangled with a gang of thieves led by the infamous Fagin. But Oliver is different. His innocence and purity...

"The work of a young novelist at the height of his powers, "Nicholas Nickleby" is one of the touchstones of the English comic novel. Around the central story of Nicholas Nickleby and the misfortunes of his family, Dickens created some of his most wonderful characters: the muddle-headed Mrs Nickleby, the gloriously theatrical Crummles, their protege Miss Petowker, the pretentious Mantalinis and the mindlessly cruel Squeers and his wife. "Nicholas Nickleby"'s...

Gathered round the fire at the Maypole Inn, in the village of Chigwell, on a foul weather evening in the year 1775 were John Willet, proprietor of the Maypole, and his three cronies. One of the three, Soloman Daisy, tells a stranger at the inn a well-known local tale of the murder of Reuben Haredale which had occurred 22 years ago that very day. Reuben had been owner of the Warren, an estate in the area, now the residence of the deceased Reuben's...