A story of the road, a genre at which Dickens excelled. Little Nell and her grandfather, pursued relentlessly through England by the evil and loathsome dwarf Quilp, meet a fascinating variety of vividly portrayed characters, including Mrs. Jarley, and Codlin and Short, the Punch and Judy men.

This novel is told from the point of view of Philip Pirrip, nicknamed Pip, who begins his tale as a young boy visiting the graves of his parents when an escaped convict happens upon him and threatens him into helping him get food. This experience will have a huge impact on Pip's life, although just how huge is left to be discovered until much later in the novel. Pip soon finds himself in the service of an eccentrically, manically wounded old woman...

"It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Following his father's death John Harmon returns to London to claim his inheritance, but he finds he is eligible only if he marries Bella Wilfer. To observe her character he...

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...

In a series of adventures Nicholas, a young hero, journeys from the dungeonlike Yorkshire boys' boarding school to a high-spirited acting troupe in nineteenth-century England.

In this novel, Dickens creates the Victorian industrial city of Coketown, in northern England, and its unforgettable citizens, such as the unwavering utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the factory owner Josiah Bounderby. The result is this famous critique of capitalist philosophy, the exploitative force that Dickens believed was destroying human creativity and joy. This edition includes new notes to the text.

Mr. Samuel Pickwick, retired business man and confirmed bachelor, is determined that after a quite life of enterprise the time has come to go out into the world. Together with the other members of the Pickwick Club: Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass and Nathaniel Winkle, the portly innocent embarks on a series of hilariously comic adventures. But can Pickwick retain his good will towards his fellow humans once he discovers the evils of the world?