Charles Dickens

A simplified retelling of how the miserly Scrooge learns the true meaning of Christmas when three ghostly visitors review his past and foretell his future.

After harsh early years, Pip, an orphan growing up in Victorian England, is given the means to become a gentleman by an unknown benefactor and learns that outward appearances can be deceiving.

After orphan Oliver Twist asks for more food, he has to flee the workhouse and ends up on the streets of London. There 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 of the young orphan, determined to drag him back.

John Harmon returns to England as his father's heir. Believed drowned under suspicious circumstances--a situation convenient to his wish for anonymity--John evaluates Bella Wilfer whom he must marry to secure his inheritance. The story is filled with colorful Victorian characters and incidents -- the faded aristocrats and parvenus gathered at the Veneering's dinner table, Betty Higden and her terror of the workhouse and the greedy plottings of Silas...

Who killed Edwin Drood? Was it his opium-addict uncle, John Jasper, or the quarrelsome Neville Landless? Or was Drood actually dead? Taking us from the calm cathedral town of Cloisterharn to London's filthy opium dens, Dickens creates a haunting atmosphere and slowly unravels the threads of revelations, twisted though they may be. It was not surprising that Charles Dickens, a close friend of Wilkie Collins, wrote a mystery novel. Further, it is not...

Little Dorrit is Amy, born in debtor's prison, the youngest child of debtor William Dorrit, an inmate of the Marshalsea. The two are befriended by a man whose wife hires Little Dorrit as a seamstress. When William Dorrit inherits a fortune, he escapes the Marshalsea. The family, assuming a station befitting heir wealth, travel to Italy. Meantime, their benefactor falls onto hard times all his own when he becomes the victim of a gigantic fraud perpetrated...

Wealthy and old, Martin Chuzzlewit Sr. is surrounded by greedy relatives hoping to obtain a portion of his estate upon his death. His two descendants, Martin Jr. and Jonas, have been born and bred in the same heritage of selfishness, the Chuzzlewit tradition.

Set partly in America, of which Dickens offers a searing satire, this novel follows and contrasts the opposing fates of Martin and Jonas. While one achieves worldly success and, eventually,

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Oliver Twist is born an orphan and grows up handed from bad position to worse. Eventually he ends up in the London street gang run by Fagin, who attempts to blacken the boy's pure soul in his service. Through chance and coincidence Oliver is restored to his mother's middle-class family, where he is shown love and comfort for the first time in his life. The villains' attempts to kidnap him back are foiled and all are transported or hanged.

Full

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Two of the most beloved novels in all of English literature-together in one extraordinary volume.
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of the two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed...

'Every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding'
Dickens's story of solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by a series of ghostly visitors, has had an enduring influence on the way we think about the season. Dickens's other Christmas writings collected here include 'The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton'; 'The Haunted Man'; and shorter pieces,

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