Books by Charles Dickens

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Book SynopsisEl éxito en 1837 de Estampas de señoritas de William Caswall, un humorista que escribía con seudónimo, empujó a Charles Dickens a publicar una réplica anónima, Estampas de caballeretes (1838), dedicada a las señoritas del Reino Unido. En ella acusaba amablemente a Caswall de cierta misoginia y se disponía a ampliar el repertorio al género masculino. En 1840 continuó el ciclo con Estampas de parejitas, preocupado por el peligro de superpoblación que podría acarrear el ejemplo del matrimonio de la reina Victoria. En conjunto, estas tres series de estampas componen un sensacional cuadro satírico de la juventud victoriana.

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Book SynopsisCuando el joven Martin Chuzzlewit se enamora de Mary Graham, la señorita de compañía de su abuelo, y desata la ira de este, busca refugio en casa de otro pariente suyo, el señor Pecksniff, arquitecto que jamás ha construido nada e imagen viva de la mezquindad y la hipocresía.Serán necesarias muchas penalidades y aventuras, dentro y fuera de su diabólica familia entre ellas un tremendo viaje en busca de fortuna a Estados Unidos que en su día fue considerado toda una afrenta, para que Martin conozca lo que es realmente el amor, la amistad y la lealtad. Para Dickens, Vida y aventuras de Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), que aquí presentamos en una nueva traducción de Miguel Temprano García, era con creces la mejor de mis historias, y para William Boyd sigue siendo su novela más terriblemente divertida.

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Book SynopsisDespués de más de veinte años en China, Arthur Clennam vuelve a Londres convencido de haber desperdiciado su juventud y de que ya ha pasado para él el momento del amor. Su madre, una anciana inválida y siniestra, le recibe gélidamente en la habitación de la que lleva doce años sin salir, y en la que, al fondo, en la penumbra, cose una desventurada muchacha. Arthur cobra enseguida interés por ella, sospechando que puede guardar la clave de un vergonzoso secreto familiar que su madre tenazmente le oculta, y descubre que se trata de Amy Dorrit, nacida en la cárcel de deudores de Marshalsea, donde su padre, uno de los más antiguos presos, es toda una institución. La pequeña Dorrit (1855-1857), que presentamos en una nueva traducción de Carmen Francí e Ismael Attrache, es sin duda uno de los mejores Dickens, compendio monumental de su destreza narrativa, de su ingenio cómico y de su talento inigualable para crear ambientes y personajes.

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Book Synopsis" Oliver Twist " es una novela que capta desde el primer momento la atención del lector y la mantiene hasta su última página. Una trama excelentemente urdida, personajes inolvidables, buenos y malvados, drama, tensión, amenazas y peligros, aventuras y peripecias, y un final inesperado y feliz son los ingredientes que hacen de ella una obra sin edad, objeto de numerosas adaptaciones en cine y televisión.

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Book SynopsisIn this 1846 publication Charles Dickens describes the landscapes, architecture, people and customs he observed during a year's stay in Italy with his family in 1844. Originally published as letters in the Daily News, the book is notable for the same shrewd social observations that Dickens demonstrates in his novels.Table of ContentsOne reader's passport; Going through France; Lyons, the Rhone, and the Goblin of Avignon; Avignon to Genoa; Genoa and its neighbourhood; To Parma, Modena, and Bologna; Through Bologna and Ferrara; An Italian dream; By Verona, Mantua, and Milan, across the Pass of the Simplon into Switzerland; To Rome by Pisa and Siena; Rome; A rapid diorama.

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Book SynopsisPuffin Classics bring the very best children''s stories to a new generation.The world-famous story of a young boy who seeks his fortune on the streets of London, introduced by the hugely popular children''s author, Garth Nix.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 of the young orphan, determined to drag him back . . .Trade Review"The power of [Dickens] is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive, and must follow him whithersoever he leads."--William Makepeace Thackeray

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Book SynopsisCharles Darnay and Sydney Carton are alike in appearance, different in character and in love with the same woman. In the midst of the French Revolution, Darnay, who has fled to London to escape the cruelty of the French nobility, must return to Paris to rescue his servant from death. But he endangers his own life and is captured. Carton may be able to help, but will his resemblance be enough to save Darnay's life? With an enticing introduction by bestselling author, Roddy Doyle.Trade ReviewThe Puffin Classic series is the perfect way of reading the old and the new – and loving both -- Julia Eccleshare in * Lovereading4Kids *

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Book SynopsisAs 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.

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Book SynopsisOne of Charles Dickens’s most critically admired novels, this story of a monumental and life-consuming court case features one of his most vast and varied casts of colorful characters.In Bleak House, competing claims of love and inheritance—complicated by murder—have given rise to a costly and decades-long legal battle that one litigant refers to as “the family curse.” The insidious London fog that rises from the river Thames and seeps into the very bones of the characters symbolizes the pervasive corruption of the legal system and the society that supports it, targets of Dickens’s satirical wrath. Displaying Dickens’s familiar panoramic sweep and brilliant characters—including the mysterious orphan Esther Summerson, her gentle guardian John Jarndyce, the haughty Lady Dedlock, and the scheming lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn—the novel is also a bold experimental narrative that unforgettably dramatizes our most basic human c

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Book SynopsisThe shortest of Charles Dickens’s novels, Hard Times is also his most pointed and impassioned satire of social injustice.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 Bounderby; Stephen Blackpool, an honest worker wrongly accused of a crime; and Sissy Jupe, a circus performer whose father abandons her to what he hopes is a better life—all come alive in classic Dickensian fashion, and contribute to a satiric vision of society tempered equally by righteous anger and compassionate humanity.

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Book SynopsisIn this classic social commentary from Dickens, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, retired business man and confirmed bachelor, is determined that after a quiet 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?Charles Dickens’s satirical masterpiece, The Pickwick Papers, catapulted the young writer into literary fame when it was first serialized in 1836–37. It recounts the rollicking adventures of the members of the Pickwick Club as they travel about England getting into all sorts of mischief.Laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly entertaining, the book also reveals Dickens’s burgeoning interest in the parliamentary system, lawyers, the Poor Laws, and the ills of debtors’ prisons. As G. K. Chesterton noted, “Before [Dickens] wrote a single real story, he had a kind of vision . . . a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures. That vision was Pickwick.”

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Book SynopsisThis Norton Critical Edition reprints the original 1850 text of Dickens’ most autobiographical novel, and his own personal favorite, including all of the line drawings by Phiz.

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Book SynopsisIn the fog of London, lawyers enrich themselves with endless litigation over a dwindling inheritance. A sterling example of Dickens''s genius for character, dramatic construction, and social satire, this novel was hailed by Edmund Wilson as a masterpiece.

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Book SynopsisWhen John Harmon—who has been left a fortune if he will marry the girl his miserly father chose for him—is found floating dead in the Thames, he sets in motion a story overflowing with cases of deception and mistaken identity, of murder and attempted murder, of sin and redemption. The influence of the notorious Harmon inheritance ripples through a large cast of vividly drawn characters from every level of society, including Noddy Boffin, known as “the Golden Dustman”; the one-legged villain Silas Wegg; willful Bella Wilfer; saintly Lizzie Hexam; the sharp-witted doll’s dressmaker Jenny Wren; the social-climbing Veneerings; the ruthless speculator Fascination Fledgeby; and the river-scavenging corpse robbers Gaffer Hexam and Rogue Riderhood. Out of this flurry of invention Dickens creates in Our Mutual Friend a portrait of a city and a civilization that is at once indignant, compassionate, and utterly unforgettable.Charles Dickens’s last completed novel features one of his most surreal and haunting visions of  London, shadowed by towering dust heaps that supply the corrupting riches at the heart of the plot and washed by the dark river that winds its way insistently through the story.This edition reprints the original Everyman’s preface by G. K. Chesterton and features forty illustrations by Marcus Stone.

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Book SynopsisCharles Dickens had an understanding of mid-Victorian society second to none, and genius and energy massive enough to make the absurdities and terrors of that society come alive on the page. Nicholas Nickleby, with its episodes of chicanery in finance and education, and the dramatic intensity with which it tells the story of its openhearted young protagonist and its frightening villain, the magnificently rendered Ralph Nickleby, represents Dickens at his clear-eyed, indignant, and mesmerizing best.             When Nicholas Nickleby is left penniless by the death of his father, he appeals to his Uncle Ralph to help him and his mother and sister. But Ralph conceives a violent hatred of the young man, and his schemes of persecution haunt Nicholas through a series of picaresque adventures, including a job as a tutor at a horrific school for unwanted boys run by the cruel Wackford Squeers and a stint as a member of the eccentric Crummles family theater troupe. Without shying away from the grimmer aspects of the world Nicholas encounters on his path to eventual happiness, the story remains one of Dickens’s most high-spirited and exuberant. This edition reprints the original Everyman preface by G. K. Chesterton and includes thirty-nine illustrations by Phiz.

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Book SynopsisIt is said that all England mourned the heartbreaking fate of little Paul Dombey, but it is the ordeal of his loving and long-suffering sister, Florence, that carries the full emotional weight of the story. Their father’s cold obsession with the future of his business empire, the malevolent plotting of his greedy manager, Mr. Carker, and the tragic self-contempt of his proud second wife, Edith, cast a dark shadow over the life of the motherless girl. But as the world of Dombey and Son begins to fall to pieces, Florence is sustained by the warmth and brightness of humbler allies: her fiercely loyal nurse, Susan Nipper; her haplessly devoted suitor, Toots; the rough but loveable old salt Captain Cuttle and his friend Sol Gills; and her fervent admirer, the orphan Walter Gay. In its locomotive power and its transcendent moments of suspense and revelation, Dombey and Son is a superb example of Dickens’s ability to combine the qualities of a social historian, a theatrical artist, and a poet of the utmost tenderness and insight.Charles Dickens set this tale of a hard-hearted businessman, the son he pins all his hopes on, and the daughter he cruelly neglects in a country undergoing the storms of change brought by the Industrial Revolution.This edition reprints the original Everyman’s introduction by G.K. Chesterton and includes forty illustrations by Phiz.

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Book SynopsisAt the center of Martin Chuzzlewit--the novel Angus Wilson called one of the most sheerly exciting of all Dickens stories--is Martin himself, very old, very rich, very much on his guard. What he suspects (with good reason) is that every one of Iris close and distant relations, now converging in droves on the country inn where they believe he is dying, will stop at nothing to become the inheritor of his great fortune.The distinctive combination of manic comedy, bitter satire and fierce melodrama separates this novel from its author's other works. Published in 1844 after Dickens returned from America, the action moves between Britain and United States in ways which highlight the failing of both societies.

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Book SynopsisCharles Dickens’s story of selfless Little Nell and her ailing grandfather and their persecution by the magnificently malignant villain Quilp has seized the imaginations and wrung the hearts of generations of readers. Dickens’s talent was superabundant in every way: in his dramatic force and his massive productivity, in his almost surreal comic power, in his compassion and thirst for justice, and in the imaginative pressure he brought to bear on even the most incidental of his characters. The delightfully various figures in The Old Curiosity Shop range memorably from jaunty Dick Swiveller and his little half-starved Marchioness to the hard-hearted siblings Sampson and Sally Brass, jovial Mrs. Jarley, devoted Kit Nubbles, the hunchbacked Daniel Quilp, and, of course, tragic Little Nell herself. Dickens’s depiction of the fate of his main characters is famously harrowing and unfailingly suspenseful, but not the least of its charms is that it is embellished with a supporting cast of figures as grotesque and colorful as anything in the Old Curiosity Shop itself.             This edition reprints the original Everyman’s preface by G. K. Chesterton and features seventy-five illustrations by Cattermole and Phiz.

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Book SynopsisHugely admired by Tolstoy, David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens''s own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness, heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains. Praising Dickens''s power of invention, Somerset Maugham wrote: 'There were never such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens''s exultant imagination...you can never quite forget them.'This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes a new Introduction by Pulitzer Prize finalist David Gates, in addition to new explanatory notes.

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Book SynopsisThe citizens of Charles Dickens' Coketown have entertained readers since the 19th century. In this adaptation of Hard Times, Heidi Stillman brings these iconic characters to the stage, revealing the universality of their hopes and suffering in their times and in ours.

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Book SynopsisThe final, unfinished novel of Charles Dickens that is in many ways his most intriguing—a gripping, haunting masterpiece that foreshadows the detective stories of Conan Doyle and the nightmarish novels of Kafka.The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a highly atmospheric tale of murder. Central to the plot is John Jasper: in public he is a man of integrity and benevolence; in private he is an opium addict. And while seeming to smile on the engagement of his nephew, Edwin Drood, he is, in fact, consumed by jealousy, driven to terrify the boy’s fiancée and to plot the murder of Edwin himself. As in many of Dickens’s greatest novels, the gulf between appearance and reality drives the action. Set in the seemingly innocuous cathedral town of Cloisterham, the story rapidly darkens with a sense of impending evil. Though The Mystery of Edwin Drood is one of its author’s darkest books, it also bustles with a vast roster of memorable–and delightfully named–minor characters: Mrs. Billikins, the landlady; the foolish Mr. Sapsea; the domineering philanthropist, Mr. Honeythunder; and the mysterious Datchery. Several attempts have been made over the years to complete the novel and solve the mystery, but even in its unfinished state it is a masterpiece.

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Book SynopsisOriginal by Charles Dickens Adapted for the stage by Charles Way Dominated by Gradgrind and Bounderby, Coketown's prosperity is built on the cotton mills where thousands of men and women slave away for long hours and little pay. Gradgrind's obsession with material progress damages his children Louisa and Tom, leading to scandal and disaster. Hard Times celebrates the importance of the human heart in an age obsessed with materialism. Circus, music, and dark comedy all go into the rich mix of this truly Dickensian theatrical tale.Trade Review“A stellar adaptation by Charles Way, moving, thoughtful and wonderfully drawn.” What's on Stage ***** “Way gives real depth to characters, replaces Dickens' sentimentality with warmth and his censoriousness with moral indignation.” The Independent ***** “Daringly restructures Dickens' plot, yet sticks to the motto of his lisping ringmaster Mr Sleary: People mutht be amuthed.” Observer “Charles Way's new adaptation uses no narration—it is so refreshing to see a Dickens adaptation that isn't like having sections of the book read to you—apart from when the actors tell us what eventually happens to their characters right at the end. It also doesn't bite off more than it can chew, using only storylines that can be told in sufficient detail to make sense and tie in with other elements of the plot.” British Theatre Guide “A re-reading of the novel showed Way’s adaptation to be faithful to the original, including the pathos and the humour.” Manchester Theatre Awards

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