Search results for ""Author Charles Dickens"
Penguin Books Ltd Martin Chuzzlewit
'Among the most powerful things Dickens ever did in fiction' GuardianGreed has led wealthy old Martin Chuzzlewit to become suspicious and misanthropic, leaving his grandson and name-sake to make his own way in the world. And so young Martin sets out from the Wiltshire home of his supposed champion, the scheming architect Pecksniff, to seek his fortune in America. In depicting Martin's journey Dickens created many vividly realized figures, from Martin's optimistic manservant Mark Tapley to the drunken and corrupt private nurse Mrs Gamp. With its portrayal of greed, blackmail and murder, and its searing satire on America, Dickens's novel is a powerful and blackly comic story of hypocrisy and redemption.Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Patricia Ingham
£10.42
Alfaguara El tao del viajero
Paul Theroux celebra cincuenta años de viajar por el mundo y reúne lo mejor de su obra y los pasajes más memorables de aquellos autores que lo han formado como lector y viajero: Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Johnson, Evelyn Waugh, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene y DH Lawrence entre otros se dan cita en estas páginas. Guía filosófica y libro de viajes a la vez, El Tao del viajero es una obra para regalar y atesorar, para leer una y otra vez, como libro de cabecera que marca el camino espiritual del viajero que todos llevamos dentro.
£19.29
The History Press Ltd Masters of Crime: Fiction's Finest Villains and Their Real-Life Inspirations
This fascinating volume reveals the real men – and women – behind some of the most infamous London villains ever to appear in fiction. Fagin, Professor Moriarty, Moll Cutpurse and the notorious 'cracksman' A.J. Raffles were all rooted in the lives and deaths of a litany of real-life criminals, agitators and activists. With a special emphasis on the city that spawned them, this book brings together their stories for the first time, and shows how they were woven into fiction by some of Britain’s greatest writers, including Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. Containing prison escapes, sensational trials, daring art thefts, vicious attacks, roaring boys, black magicians and private detectives, Masters of Crime explores both the real underworld of British crime history, and its fictional counter-parts. It will delight fans of true crime and crime fiction alike.
£17.09
WW Norton & Co Oliver Twist: A Norton Critical Edition
The editor has corrected printers’ errors and annotated unfamiliar terms and allusions. Three illustrations by George Cruikshank and a map of Oliver's London accompany the text. "Backgrounds and Sources" focuses on The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, central both to Dickens and to the characters in Oliver Twist. The act’s far-reaching implications are considered in source materials that include parlimentary debates on The Poor Laws, a harrowing account of an 1835 Bedfordshire riot, and "An Appeal to Fallen Women," Dickens’ 1847 open letter to London’s prostitutes urging them to turn their backs on "debauchery and neglect." Ten letters on Oliver Twist, written between 1837 and 1864, are reprinted, including those to the novel’s publisher, the novel’s illustrator, and John Forster, Dickens’ close friend and future biographer. In addition, readers can trace the evolution of the novel by examining Dickens’ installment and chapter-division plans and enjoy "Sikes and Nancy," the text of a public reading Dickens composed and performed often to large audiences. "Early Reviews" provides eight witty, insightful, and at times impassioned responses to the novel and to Oliver’s plight by William Makepeace Thackeray and John Forster (anonymously), among others. "Criticism" includes twenty of the most significant interpretations of Oliver Twist published in this century. Included are essays by Henry James, George Gissing, Graham Greene, J. Hillis Miller, Harry Stone, Philip Collins, John Bayley, Keith Hollingsworth, Steven Marcus, Monroe Engel, James R. Kincaid, Michael Slater, Dennis Walder, Burton M. Wheeler, Janet Larson, Fred Kaplan, Robert Tracy, David Miller, John O. Jordan, and Gary Wills. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
£13.89
Wordsworth Editions Ltd A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol is the most famous, heart-warming and chilling festive story of them all. In these pages we meet Ebenezer Scrooge, whose name is synonymous with greed and parsimony: 'Every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart'. This attitude is soon challenged when the ghost of his old partner, Jacob Marley, returns from the grave to haunt him on Christmas Eve. Scrooge is then visited in turn by three spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future, each one revealing the error of his ways and gradually melting the frozen heart of this old miser, leading him towards his redemption. On the journey we take with Scrooge we encounter a rich array of Dickensian characters including the poor Cratchit family with the ailing Tiny Tim and the generous and jolly Fezziwig. When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843 he fashioned an enduring gift to the world, capturing the essence of the love, kindness and generosity of the Christmas season. It is a timeless classic and the story’s uplifting magic remains as potent today as when it was first published.
£5.90
Penguin Books Ltd Selected Short Fiction
This witty and amusing collection of short pieces shows Dickens liberated from the more formal and sustained demands of the novel and experimenting with a diverse range of fictional techniques. In his tales of the supernatural, he creates frighteningly believable, spine-tingling stories of prophetic dreams and visions, as well as more fantastical adventures with goblins and apparitions. Impressionistic sketches combine imaginatively heightened travel journals with wry observations of home and abroad, while in his dramatic monologues, Dickens demonstrates his talent for exploring the secret workings of the human mind. These short works display Dickens's exuberant sense of comedy and character as his imagination is given free rein.
£9.99
Little, Brown Book Group London: A Traveller's Reader
Loved and hated in equal measure, London was for centuries the world's greatest city. Its streets, teeming with history, have always worn a variety of influences, reflecting the diverse crowds who have walked them. Its citizens have witnessed everything from pilgrimages, celebrations, acts of heroism and moments of religious contemplation to riots, executions, grisly murders and disastrous plagues and fires. Drawing on letters, diaries and memoirs of London's most interesting inhabitants and visitors, this anthology compiled by acclaimed historian Thomas Wright and with an introduction by Peter Ackroyd tells the story of the city from its earliest years.Here you will find John Evelyn's famous account of the Great Fire in 1666, Dickens's brilliant evocation of the Gordon Riots of 1780, an eyewitness description of the execution of Charles I, and Churchill's recollections of the Blitz. There are also less familiar, though no less vivid, excerpts, which provide an entertaining, sometimes risqué glimpse into the life, customs and morals of this great city.
£11.99
ECW Press,Canada Off the Tracks
Train travel is having a renaissance. Grand old routes that had been cancelled, or were moldering in neglect, have been refurbished as destinations in themselves. The Rocky Mountaineer, the Orient Express, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad run again in all their glory. Pamela Mulloy has always loved train travel. Whether returning to the Maritimes every year with her daughter on the Ocean, or taking her family across Europe to Poland, trains have been a linchpin of her life. As COVID locked us down, Mulloy began an imaginary journey that recalled the trips she has taken, as well as those of others. Whether it was Mary Wollstonecraft traveling alone to Sweden in the late 1700s, or the incident that had Charles Dickens forever fearful of trains, or the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt trapped in her carriage in a midwestern blizzard in the 1890s, or Sir John A. Macdonald''s wife daring to cross the Rockies tied to the cowcatcher at the front of the train, the stories explore the odd mix of a
£17.99
Reaktion Books Boxing: A Cultural History
Throughout history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers, and filmmakers have recorded and tried to make sense of boxing. From Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In her encyclopedic investigation of the shifting social, political, and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, Kasia Boddy throws new light on an elemental struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boddy explores the ways in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media. Boddy pulls no punches, looking to the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding and Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin and Philip Roth, James Joyce and Mae West, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Dickens in an all-encompassing study that tells us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.
£12.99
HarperCollins Publishers The Joy of Pubs: Everything you wanted to know about Britain's favourite drinking establishment
Following on in the same vain as The Joy of Sheds, The Joy of Pubs is an intoxicating publication detailing everything and anything you want to know about pubs. It celebrates the many facets of the traditional British pub over the years, with chapters on: Pub Characters, Pub Games, Pub Fiddles (how the licensee has shafted his customers over the years), Pub Teams and Pub History from Geoffrey Chaucer to Jeffrey Bernard. It features the great pubs of literature – Robert Louis Stevenson’s Admiral Benbow, Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn and Charles Dickens’ The Grapes; the great pubs of film – The Crown Inn at Amersham (Four Weddings and a Funeral), the Crown Inn at Wells (Hot Fuzz); the great pubs of TV – apart from the Rover's Return, Queen Vic and Woolpack. It features tales of barring, of dodgy deals of riotous lock-ins and of strange hauntings. The perfect present for anyone who loves their pub or just the idea that they have a pub. Word count: 30,000
£12.99
Oxford University Press Past and Present
Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (1843) was a prophetic warning of impending disaster for mid-Victorian Britain that was delivered in what the author described as a 'miraculous thunder-voice, from out of the centre of the world.' The impact of Carlyle's social criticism was immediate and profound, shaping debate about the 'The Condition of England' question well into the twentieth century and beyond, and serving as the moral foundation of the welfare state. His relentlessly abrasive and illuminating critique of industrial civilization generated a vast range of response both in England, Europe, and the United States. The writings of Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, William Morris, John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin, as well as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, were saturated with imagery and ideas directly indebted to the book. Past and Present also provided novelists and poets with an enduring vision of the ubiquitous rot that lay at the heart of 'laissez-faire' England. The repercussions of Carlyle's unique analysis can be witnessed in the literary form and thematic content of such works as Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1848), Bleak House (1852-53), and Hard Times (1854); Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845); Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855); and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850). Poets such as Alfred Tennyson in Maud (1855), Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh (1856), and Arthur Hugh Clough in The Latest Decalogue (1862) built a vocabulary that was steeped in the outrage and indignation of Carlyle's polemic. The artist Ford Madox Brown attempted in his painting Work (1852-65) to give visual testimony to the profound social schisms that Carlyle had exposed in Past and Present and to pay tribute to the 'Sage' who had 'moulded a nation to his pattern.'
£8.71
Baker Publishing Group The Barrister and the Letter of Marque
Winner of 2022 Daphne du Maurier Award in Overall Published Division and Mainstream Suspense/Mystery As a barrister in 1818 London, William Snopes has witnessed firsthand the danger of only the wealthy having their voices heard, and he's a strong advocate who defends the poorer classes against the powerful. That changes the day a struggling heiress, Lady Madeleine Jameson, arrives at his door. In a last-ditch effort to save her faltering estate, Lady Jameson invested in a merchant brig, the Padget. The ship was granted a rare privilege by the king's regent: a Letter of Marque authorizing the captain to seize the cargo of French traders operating illegally in the Indian Sea. Yet when the Padget returns to London, her crew is met by soldiers ready to take possession of their goods and arrest the captain for piracy. And the Letter--the sole proof his actions were legal--has mysteriously vanished. Moved by the lady's distress, intrigued by the Letter, and goaded by an opposing solicitor, Snopes takes the case. But as he delves deeper into the mystery, he learns that the forces arrayed against Lady Jameson, and now himself, are even more perilous than he'd imagined. "The Barrister and the Letter of Marque combines the intrigue of John Grisham, the vibrant world of Charles Dickens, and a mystery worthy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. . . . This richly historical and lively paced story has all the makings of a modern classic."--JOCELYN GREEN, Christy Award-winning author of Shadows of the White City "At once atmospheric and gripping, Johnson's latest is a luminous and refreshing new offering in inspirational historical fiction."--RACHEL MCMILLAN, author of The London Restoration and The Mozart Code "A fascinating glimpse into a Regency London readers seldom see."--ROSEANNA M. WHITE, bestselling author of Edwardian fiction
£13.94
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The French Riviera: A Literary Guide for Travellers
A reader's journey along the French Riviera, from Hyeres and Saint-Tropez to the Italian border, introducing the lives and work of writers who passed this way. The sunlight and calm of the French Riviera have been a magnet for writers since the fourteenth century. The Cote d'Azur has provided the inspiration and setting for some of the greatest literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From distinguished Nobel laureates to new authors who found their voices there, Ted Jones's encyclopaedic work covers them all: writers such as Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham, who spent much of their lives there; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Guy de Maupassant, whose work it dominates. The book also includes the countless writers who simply lingered there, including Louisa M. Alcott, Hans Christian Anderson, J.G. Ballard, Samuel Beckett, Arnold Bennett, William Boyd, Bertholt Brecht, Anthony Burgess, Albert Camus, Bruce Chatwin, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Ian Fleming, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, A.A. Milne, Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anton Tchekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Evelyn Waugh, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats - and many others.
£14.99
Johns Hopkins University Press Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
Rae Greiner proposes that sympathy is integral to the form of the classic nineteenth-century realist novel. Following the philosophy of Adam Smith, Greiner argues that sympathy does more than foster emotional identification with others; it is a way of thinking along with them. By abstracting emotions, feelings turn into detached figures of speech that may be shared. Sympathy in this way produces realism; it is the imaginative process through which the real is substantiated. In "Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction" Greiner shows how this imaginative process of sympathy is written into three novelistic techniques regularly associated with nineteenth-century fiction: metonymy, free indirect discourse, and realist characterization. She explores the work of sentimentalist philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham and realist novelists Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James.
£56.91
Pen & Sword Books Ltd Who Were The Real Oliver Twists
Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist exposed a brutal but commonplace system of child exploitation to Victorian readers. Conditions in workhouses, factories, and child criminal gangs posed lethal and daily hazards to children born to poverty. Several much-needed reforms took place in the aftermath of Oliver Twist's publication. But what were the circumstances of childhood poverty in Victorian London and other English cities? And who were the real Oliver Twists?This book explores how nineteenth century laws and social institutions entirely failed to protect children born to poor and unstable families. Despite a horrible labyrinth of ten-hour workdays, illegal indentures, and forced emigration, however, many children overcame terrible prospects and thrived. Some of these remarkable stories of childhood resilience, innovation, and enterprise have been lost to the general reader. This book brings those stories back to light.
£19.80
John Murray Press The Gaol
For over 800 years Newgate was the grimy axle around which British society slowly twisted. This is where such legendary outlaws as Robin Hood and Captain Kidd met their fates, where the rapier-wielding playwrights Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe sharpened their quills, and where flamboyant highwaymen like Claude Duval and James Maclaine made legions of women swoon. While London's theatres came and went, the gaol endured as Londons unofficial stage. From the Peasants Revolt to the Great Fire, it was at Newgate that England's greatest dramas unfolded. By piecing together the lives of forgotten figures as well as re-examining the prison's links with more famous individuals, from Dick Whittington to Charles Dickens, this thrilling history goes in search of a ghostly place, erased by time, which has inspired more poems and plays, paintings and novels, than any other structure in British history.
£12.99
Penguin Books Ltd Great Expectations (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
A graphic deluxe edition to mark the 150th anniversary of Dickens's most well-loved novel. A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor-these form a series of events that change the orphan Pip's life forever, as he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman. Dickens's haunting novel depicts Pip's education and development through adversity as he discovers the true nature of his great expectations. Published nine years before Dickens's death, it remains one of his most celebrated works.
£12.99
Thomas Nelson Publishers 52 Little Lessons from A Christmas Carol
How do we learn life lessons from a grumpy penny-pincher so unpleasant that dogs run from him on sight? Does Scripture suggest we all have a touch of Scrooge in us? Can we all benefit from reexamining who we've become in our own life stories? Bestselling author Bob Welch invites us to discover these questions and more in 52 Little Lessons from A Christmas Carol.Join Welch as he takes you deeper into the nuances of this timeless story by Charles Dickens. From the stinginess of Scrooge to the innocence of Tiny Tim, the biblically based devotions in 52 Little Lessons from A Christmas Carol will inspire you to live for what really matters--not only at Christmas, but all year long.52 Little Lessons from A Christmas Carol will help you get to know this holiday classic--and yourself--better. This devotional, much like the original novel, is tinted with a fair share of how-not-to-live lessons as well as how-to-live lessons, helping us see that we can learn from both, just like we do in scripture.As you enjoy A Christmas Carol in this brand new light, you'll learn that: Death is a comma, not a period It's never too late to change Generosity changes your perspective Life is best lived imaginatively With help from others, we can all become the best versions of ourselves In 52 Little Lessons from A Christmas Carol, discover why A Christmas Carol is more than just a holiday tradition--it's an exploration of charity, grief, and making the most of the lives that we're given.
£15.22
Oxford University Press Great Expectations
'you are to understand, Mr. Pip, that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret...' Young Pip lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith, with few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past - the escaped convict Magwitch, the time-withered Miss Havisham and her proud and beautiful ward, Estella - and in time uncovers not just the origins of his great expectations but the mystery of his own heart. A powerful and moving novel, Great Expectations is suffused with Dickens's memories of the past and its grip on the present, and it raises disturbing questions about the extent to which individuals affect each other's lives. This edition includes a lively introduction, Dickens's working notes, the novel's original ending, and an extract from an early theatrical adaptation. It reprints the definitive Clarendon text. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
£7.15
Pen & Sword Books Ltd The Bermondsey Murder
When Patrick O'Connor went missing in August 1849, his friends were suspicious. The London dock worker was last seen in the company of Swiss-born Maria Manning and her husband in Bermondsey. By the time police officers discovered his remains under the kitchen floor, the couple had fled. This shocking crime sparked a race against time to bring these cold-blooded killers to justice. After almost a decade of unsolved murders in the capital, could Scotland Yard detectives find the murderous pair and restore public confidence in their sleuthing skills?The search for the Mannings spread beyond England and was closely followed by the Victorian public, including prominent writers such as Charles Dickens who was haunted by the case and later immortalised some of the key characters in _Bleak House_, which was published just four years later. To this day, the Bermondsey Murder remains a legendary crime in the history of Scotland Yard and mid-nineteenth century London. Using primary source mat
£20.09
Penguin Random House Children's UK A Tale of Two Cities
Introduced by bestselling author Roddy Doyle.Charles 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?Specially abridged for Puffin Classics.Also abridged for Puffin Classics David CopperfieldGreat Expectations
£8.42
Verso Books The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City
There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where you are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont, retraces a history of the walker. From Charles Dicken's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. He asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by taking the pavement?
£18.99
Penguin Books Ltd The Pickwick Papers
'One of my life's greatest tragedies is to have already read Pickwick Papers - I can't go back and read it for the first time' Fernando PessoaFew first novels have created as much popular excitement as The Pickwick Papers - a comic masterpiece that catapulted its twenty-four-year-old author to immediate fame. Readers were captivated by the adventures of the poet Snodgrass, the sportsman Winkle and, above all, by that quintessentially English Quixote, Mr Pickwick, and his cockney Sancho Panza, Sam Weller. From the hallowed turf of Dingley Dell Cricket Club to the unholy fracas of the Eatanswill election, characters and incidents sprang to life from Dickens's pen, to form an enduringly popular work of ebullient humour and literary invention. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Mark Wormald
£9.99
Wordsworth Editions Ltd The Mystery of Edwin Drood
With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Preston, University of Nottingham. Illustrations by S.L. Fildes and Hablot K. Browne (Phiz). Dickens’s final novel, left unfinished at his death, is a tale of mystery whose fast-paced action takes place in an ancient cathedral city and in some of the darkest places in nineteenth-century London. Drugs, sexual obsession, colonial adventuring and puzzles about identity are among the novel’s themes. At the centre of the plot lie the baffling disappearance of Edwin Drood and the many explanations of his whereabouts. A sombre and menacing atmosphere, a fascinating range of characters and Dickens’s usual superb command of language combine to make this an exciting and tantalising story. Also included in this volume are a number of unjustly neglected stories and sketches, with subjects as different as murder and guilt and childhood romance. This unusual selection illustrates Dickens’s immense creativity and versatility.
£5.90
Alma Books Ltd The Old Curiosity Shop
The beautiful Nell is a thirteen-year-old orphan who lives with her grandfather in a London bric-a-brac shop. Worried about his charge''s future, the old man secretly gambles at night in order to provide an inheritance for her, but finally loses the little he has and is evicted from the shop by the evil hunchback and loan shark Daniel Quilp, suffering a breakdown as a result. Forced to leave the city, the young girl is left to take care of her grandfather and protect herself from the scheming villains who are hot on their heels.Dickens''s fourth novel, initially serialized in his magazine Master Humphrey''s Clock between 1840 and 1841, The Old Curiosity Shop proved to be a huge hit on publication and is still regarded as one of its author''s major works, featuring one of his best-loved and most memorable heroines.
£9.04
Wordsworth Editions Ltd A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol is the most famous, heart-warming and chilling festive story of them all. In these pages we meet Ebenezer Scrooge, whose name is synonymous with greed and parsimony: 'Every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart'. This attitude is soon challenged when the ghost of his old partner, Jacob Marley, returns from the grave to haunt him on Christmas Eve. Scrooge is then visited in turn by three spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future, each one revealing the error of his ways and gradually melting the frozen heart of this old miser, leading him towards his redemption. On the journey we take with Scrooge we encounter a rich array of Dickensian characters including the poor Cratchit family with the ailing Tiny Tim and the generous and jolly Fezziwig. When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843 he fashioned an enduring gift to the world, capturing the essence of the love, kindness and generosity of the Christmas season. It is a timeless classic and the story's uplifting magic remains as potent today as when it was first published.
£9.04
WW Norton & Co Robinson Crusoe: A Norton Critical Edition
Michael Shinagel has collated the reprint with all six authorized editions published by Taylor in 1719 to achieve a text that is faithful to Defoe's original edition. Annotations assist the reader with obscure words and idioms, biblical references, and nautical terms. "Contexts" helps the reader understand the novel’s historical and religious significance. Included are four contemporary accounts of marooned men, Defoe’s autobiographical passages on the novel’s allegorical foundation, and aspects of the Puritan emblematic tradition essential for understanding the novel’s religious aspects. "Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Opinions" is a comprehensive study of early estimations by prominent literary and political figures, including Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. "Twentieth-Century Criticism" is a collection of fourteen essays (five of them new to the Second Edition) that presents a variety of perspectives on Robinson Crusoe by Virginia Woolf, Ian Watt, Eric Berne, Maximillian E. Novak, Frank Budgen, James Joyce, George A. Starr, J. Paul Hunter, James Sutherland, John J. Richetti, Leopold Damrosch, Jr., John Bender, Michael McKeon, and Carol Houlihan Flynn. A Chronology of Defoe’s life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.
£26.83
Editon Synapse Women and Employment in Nineteenth- to Early Twentieth-Century Britiain (ES 5-vol. set)
The Industrial Revolution in Britain from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century had profound effects on social and economic conditions; the working conditions of women were not an exception. Trade for women which had been rather confined to a small area such as nurses or governesses changed and British society began to permit more opportunities for women to take jobs in trades which used to be dominated by male workers. They included not only the manual labour, but also the professions, such as medicine. We often see those women workers in Victorian novels, and authors like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and others treated the issue of the working conditions or vocational education of women as important topics for their works, and the subject is now being widely studied by literary scholars as well as historian on Victorian society.This set of facsimile reprints includes eleven key contemporary publications which cover a wide range of the issues of women and trade in nineteenth-century England from various different perspectives. A pamphlet by Josephine Butler and a collection of essays by Frances Cobb, James Stuart, and George Butler, handbooks and educational books for women looking for jobs, official reports and statistics etc. are collected here, as well as a rare guidebook for young women and men published by The Apprenticeship and Skilled Employment Association in the early twentieth century. All together, it represents a very useful primary source of information for scholars on Victorian social history, culture, and literature.
£1,300.00
Coordination Group Publications Ltd (CGP) GCSE English Text Guide Great Expectations includes Online Edition and Quizzes
This superb Text Guide contains everything students need to write smashing essays about Great Expectations by Charles Dickens - and it's suitable for all major GCSE English exam boards!Inside, you'll find clear, thorough notes on the novel's context, plot, characters, themes and the writer's techniques - plus quick warm-up activities, in-depth exercises and realistic exam-style questions at the end of sections, alongside challenging questions for students aiming for Grades 8-9. Not only is this book packed with essay advice and engaging activities, it'll also gives you access to our online Sudden Fail quizzes - ideal for putting your skills to the test! To round it all off, we've rustled up a classic CGP cartoon-strip summary of the text to help remind you of all the important plot points.What's more, there''s a free Online Edition with even more activities for specific exam boards - ideal if you're on the move!
£8.89
Batsford Ltd Bedside Companion for Book Lovers: An anthology of literary delights for every night of the year
A glorious treasury of literary curiosities for every night of the year. Bedside Companion for Book Lovers contains an eclectic mix of fact and fiction, letters, diaries, essays and dedications, all suffused with the joys of books and reading. The perfect gift for the bibliophile in your life, it contains snippets from some of the greatest writers and book collectors from throughout history, including: Charles Dickens on the smell of books Maya Angelou on the pleasures of reading aloud Virginia Woolf on finding space for writing Nick Hornby on reading for pure enjoyment and much more. Along the way, you’ll find advice on how to look after your most precious volumes, what to do when books start taking over your home, and where to find the most atmospheric libraries and bookshops around the world. Keep this beautifully illustrated book by your bedside and wander into a magical world of books every night of the year.
£20.66
Ohio University Press Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle
If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices? Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.
£40.50
The Conrad Press From a bag of chips to cod confit: a tour of twenty English seaside resorts
From a bag of chips to cod confit: a tour of twenty English seaside resorts What is it about the English seaside that drives us in our millions to stroll the promenades of the plethora of resorts we have in this country? How can we understand the allure of the gaudy and raucous funfair, sand in our toes and fish and chips in our hands. Or is it, in the words of Charles Dickens, the ocean that draws us in ‘winking in the sunlight like a drowsy lion’. When the author discovered that his home town had come bottom in a ‘Which?’ review of the best to worst seaside resorts in the UK, not once, or twice, but for three years on the trot, it spurred him on to go on his own tour of these resorts. He finds a wealth of fascinating histories, eccentricities and English quirkiness, mixed up with deep-seated problems of poverty, poor health and uncertain futures. But he also discovers that our resorts are diverse places, reinvigorated by creative thinking, new entrepreneurship and fresh investment. Our English seaside resorts are alive and well, carefully curating their brands and images, seeking out new ideas and funding and using the skills and abilities of their residents to drive changes with local impact. This book will encourage you to make your own visits and learn a little about the seaside resort, a curiously English creation that we all inspired, abandoned and then re-discovered.
£12.02
Nick Hern Books David Copperfield
One of Dickens's best-loved and most autobiographical stories, brilliantly and faithfully dramatised by Alastair Cording. All Dickens's marvellous creations are here: Mr Micawber, Uriah Heep, Mrs Peggotty, Murdstone, Steerforth and Betsey Trotwood. Weaving through the colourful maze of the storyline is David's hopeless infatuation with Emily – and eventual salvation in the arms of the long-suffering Agnes. Alastair Cording's stage adaptation of Dickens's David Copperfield was first performed by Eastern Angles in 1995. It skilfully concentrates on the essentials of the story while maintaining the colour, humour and drama of the book. Most notable is its fluidity, with each scene flowing into the next without the need for cumbersome scene changes – or much scenery at all. Performable by a cast of eight, if necessary, but equally offering good roles to thirty or more.
£12.99
Flame Tree Publishing A Tale of Two Cities
Little treasures, the FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library. Each stunning, gift edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The unabridged text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader. A complex and profound book, The Tale of Two Cities explores the consequences of tyranny, fate and self-sacrifice. With much of the narrative played out in Paris, during the French Revolution Dickens examines the interplay between personal action, and the flow of history. Dr Manette, having travelled to Paris finds himself imprisoned in the Bastille for 18 brutal years, unable to see his kind and loving daughter Lucy. On his eventual return to London the two of them become witnesses in a treason case against Charles Darney who is accused of giving secrets to the French. Lucy finds a way of exonerating him, Darney falls in love with her and by some strange twist of fate he finally reveals the terrible secret that his own uncle was responsible for Manette's years in the Bastille. Manette is shocked but eventually persuaded by Darney's sincerity and true love for this daughter, so he allows them to marry, bringing happiness finally to them all.
£9.99
Nick Hern Books Bleak Expectations
The story Charles Dickens might have written after drinking too much gin… Follow half-orphan Pip's extraordinary exploits with sisters Pippa and Poppy and best friend Harry Biscuit, as they attempt to escape the calculating clutches of the dastardly Mr Gently Benevolent, defeat the hideous Hardthrasher siblings, and deflect disaster at every turn! Will evil be vanquished by virtue? Can love triumph over hate? Mark Evans' stage play Bleak Expectations is a hilarious, chaotic caper, featuring dastardly villains, preposterous names, pulse-quickening romances, heart-rending death scenes, and definitely, probably, hopefully a happy ending. Based on the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, the play opened at The Watermill Theatre, Newbury, in 2022, directed by Caroline Leslie. It transferred to the Criterion Theatre in London's West End in 2023, where it featured a medley of many well-known actors and comedians. It offers rich opportunities to amateur theatre companies looking for a gloriously daft Dickensian romp which will have their audiences joyfully transported and begging for more.
£10.99
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Peter Dickinson: Words and Music
Articles, tributes and reminiscences of composer, pianist and author Peter Dickinson are here brought together for the first time. Peter Dickinson made an enduring contribution to British musical life, and his music has been regularly performed and recorded by leading musicians. His writings, brought together here for the first time, are equally noteworthy. Covering well over half a century, the subjects are fascinatingly varied. Apart from musical interests ranging from Charles Ives to John Cage, they touch on literature; and Dickinson's meetings with W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin are an intriguing insight that led to his Auden songs and the chamber work Larkin's Jazz. American themes are prominent in this collection. There are unique reviews of concert life in New York from 1959 to 1961; an account of the teaching programme at the Juilliard School of Music at that time; three studies of Ives; and features containing original material on Copland, Thomson and Cage, all of whom Dickinson knew. Features on Erik Satie include the imaginary discussion marking his centenary in 1966. Dickinson also writes about his own music, providing an insight into what it was like being a British composer in the later twentieth century. Peter Dickinson was born in Lancashire in 1934 and lived in Suffolk until his passing. His 80th birthday was marked by a whole variety of tributes, including concerts, articles, broadcasts and various interviews - some included in this book. PETER DICKINSON was a British composer and pianist as well as author and editor of Boydell/URP books on Berkeley, Copland, Cage, Barber and Berners. As a pianist, Dickinson had a twenty-five-year, international partnership with his sister, the mezzo Meriel Dickinson, for whom he wrote song cycles to poems of E. E. Cummings, Gregory Corso and Stevie Smith. He was a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 and was widely read as a critic on the Gramophone. He was an Emeritus Professor of the Universities of Keele and London and was chair of the Bernarr Rainbow Trust, for which he edited several books on music education.
£40.00
Everyman Shaken and Stirred: Intoxicating Stories
In this lively collection, wine snobs receive their comeuppance at the hands of Roald Dahl and Edgar Allan Poe; innocents over-imbibe in tales by Jack London and Alice Munro; riotous partying exacts a comic price in stories by P. G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis; Charles Jackson and Jean Rhys chronicle liquor-soaked epiphanies; while John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov and Robert Coover set their characters afloat on surreal, soul-revealing adventures. Here, too, are well-lubricated tales by Dickens, Twain, Beckett, Colette, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Frank O'Connor, Penelope Lively, and many more.The settings include hotels and restaurants, a wine cellar in Italy, a café in Paris, a bar in Dublin, a New York nightclub, Jazz Age speakeasies, suburban lawn parties and the occasional gaol cell, and are peopled by lovers and loners, barmen and chorus girls, youths taking their first sips and experienced tipplers nursing hangovers.Whether living it up or drowning their sorrows, the vividly drawn characters in these sparkling pages will leave you shaken and stirred.
£10.99
Milkweed Editions Immediate Song: Poems
From one of our finest poets comes a collection about time—about memory, remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world. Called “the poet of things” by Richard Howard, Don Bogen understands the ways objects hold history, even if they’ve grown obsolescent, even when they’ve been forgotten. So objects—rendered in cinematic detail—fill these poems. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography. Hospitals: the patients who have passed through, the buildings that have crumbled. And, in a longer view, the people who survive in what they left behind: Thom Gunn, Charles Dickens, and the pre-Columbian architects who designed the great earthworks of Ohio two thousand years ago. Songs, ephemeral by nature but infinitely repeatable, run throughout the collection. “What did they tell me, all those years?” Bogen writes. Immediate Song offers us a retrospective glance that is at once contemplative and joyous, carefully shaped but flush with sensuous observation: a paean to what is both universal and fleeting.
£12.54
The University of Chicago Press Bleak Liberalism
Why is liberalism so often dismissed by thinkers from both the left and the right? To those calling for wholesale transformation or claiming a monopoly on "realistic" conceptions of humanity, liberalism's assured progressivism can seem hard to swallow. Bleak Liberalism makes the case for a renewed understanding of the liberal tradition, showing that it is much more attuned to the complexity of political life than conventional accounts have acknowledged. Anderson examines canonical works of high realism, political novels from England and the United States, and modernist works to argue that liberalism has engaged sober and even stark views of historical development, political dynamics, and human and social psychology. From Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Hard Times to E. M. Forster's Howards End to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, this literature demonstrates that liberalism has inventive ways of balancing sociological critique and moral aspiration. A deft blend of intellectual history and literary analysis, Bleak Liberalism reveals a richer understanding of one of the most important political ideologies of the modern era.
£25.16
Coordination Group Publications Ltd (CGP) New GCSE English Text Guide A Christmas Carol includes Online Edition Quizzes CGP GCSE English 91 Revision
Do you wish it could be Christmas every day? This smashing Text Guide is the next best thing - it contains everything students need to write brilliant essays about A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and it's suitable for all major GCSE English exam boards!Inside, you'll find clear, thorough notes on the novel's context, plot, characters, themes and the writer's techniques - plus quick warm-up activities, in-depth exercises and realistic exam-style questions at the end of sections, alongside challenging questions for students aiming for Grades 8-9. Not only is this book packed with essay advice and engaging activities, it'll also gives you access to our online Sudden Fail quizzes - ideal for putting your skills to the test! To round it all off, we've rustled up a classic CGP cartoon-strip summary of the text to help remind you of all the important plot points.What's more, there''s a free Online Edition with even more activities for specific exam boards - ideal if you're on the move!F
£8.89
Bonnier Books Ltd My Schools and Schoolmasters
This memoir is of the schooldays of one of the most extraordinary minds Scotland has produced, Hugh Miller. Miller rose, if not from absolute poverty, certainly from a modest background, to become both a specialist in the field of geology and a generalist in the wider literary world, covering, as writer and editor, subjects as diverse as poetry, folklore, science, education, religion, history and travel. In his working life he was a stonemason, banking accountant, journalist, editor, lecturer and defender of Christianity against the evolutionists. By the time of his tragic suicide in 1856, Miller's prodigious output had made him among the best known of Victorian literary figures, admired by Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and John Ruskin. By the latter part of the 19th century, his reputation extended across the world - his books were widely translated, and in America, according to the geologist Sir Archibald Geikie, "They were to be found in the remotest log huts of the far west." In 1879, the great environmentalist John Muir named one of the glaciers of Glacier Bay, Alaska, after the Cromarty stonemason.
£9.99
Workman Publishing Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York
"Enthralling; it is well worth the trip.” --New York Journal of Books Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York’s Blackwell’s Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals, quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, "a lounging, listless madhouse." Digging through city records, newspaper articles, and archival reports, Stacy Horn tells a gripping narrative through the voices of the island’s inhabitants. We also hear from the era’s officials, reformers, and journalists, including the celebrated undercover reporter Nellie Bly. And we follow the extraordinary Reverend William Glenney French as he ministers to Blackwell’s residents, battles the bureaucratic mazes of the Department of Correction and a corrupt City Hall, testifies at salacious trials, and in his diary wonders about man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. Damnation Island shows how far we’ve come in caring for the least fortunate among us—and reminds us how much work still remains.
£13.36
Yale University Press Worlds Beyond: Miniatures and Victorian Fiction
An innovative study of how the Victorians used books, portraits, fairies, microscopes, and dollhouses to imagine miniature worlds beyond perception In 1856, Elizabeth Gaskell discovered a trove of handmade miniature books that were created by Charlotte and Branwell Brontë in their youth and that, as Gaskell later recalled, “contained an immense amount of manuscript, in an inconceivably small space.” Far from being singular wonders, these two-inch volumes were part of a wide array of miniature marvels that filled the drawers and pockets of middle- and upper-class Victorians. Victorian miniatures pushed the boundaries of scientific knowledge, mechanical production, and human perception. To touch a miniature was to imagine what lay beyond these boundaries. In Worlds Beyond, Laura Forsberg reads major works of fiction by George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Lewis Carroll alongside minor genres like the doll narrative, fairy science tract, and thumb Bible. Forsberg guides readers through microscopic science, art history, children’s culture, and book production to show how Victorian miniatures offered scripts for expansive fantasies of worlds beyond perception.
£37.50
John Wiley and Sons Ltd A History of Modern Britain: 1714 to the Present
Now available in a fully-revised and updated second edition, A History of Modern Britain: 1714 to the Present provides a comprehensive survey of the social, political, economic and cultural history of Great Britain from the Hanoverian succession to the present day. Places Britain in a global context, charting the rise and fall of the British empire and the influence of imperialism on the social, economic, and political developments of the home country Includes revised sections on imperialism and the industrial revolution that have been updated to reflect recent scholarship, a more reflective view on New Labour since its demise, and an all new section on the performance of the Conservative – Lib/Dem coalition that came into office in 2010 Features illustrations, maps, an up-to-date bibliography, a full list of Prime Ministers, a genealogy of the royal family, and a comprehensive glossary explaining uniquely British terms, acronyms, and famous figures Spans topics as diverse as the slave trade, the novels of Charles Dickens, the Irish Potato Famine, the legalization of homosexuality, coalmines in South Wales, Antarctic exploration, and the invention of the computer Includes extensive reference to historiography
£29.95
Skyhorse Publishing A Literary Tea Party
**Finalist in the 2019 Goodreads Choice Awards**For fans of Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and more, a literary-inspired cookbook for voracious readers and tea lovers everywhereTea and books: the perfect pairing. There's nothing quite like sitting down to a good book on a lovely afternoon with a steaming cup of tea beside you, as you fall down the rabbit hole into the imaginative worlds of Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, and The Chronicles of Narnia.Fire up your literary fancies and nibble your way through delicate sweets and savories with A Literary Tea Party, which brings food from classic books to life with a teatime twist. Featuring fifty-five perfectly portioned recipes for an afternoon getaway, including custom homemade tea blends and beverages, you will have everything you need to plan an elaborate tea party. Cook up and enjoy:
£13.49
Watkins Media Limited The Watkins Book of English Folktales
This is a golden treasury of over one hundred English folktales captured in the form they were first collected in past centuries. Read these classic tales as they would have been told when storytelling was a living art – when the audience believed in boggarts and hobgoblins, local witches and will-o’-the-wisps, ghosts and giants, cunning foxes and royal frogs. Find “Jack the Giantkiller”, “Tom Tit Tot” and other quintessentially English favourites, alongside interesting borrowings, such as an English version of the Grimms’ “Little Snow White” – as well as bedtime frighteners, including “Captain Murderer”, as told to Charles Dickens by his childhood nurse. Neil Philip has provided a full introduction and source notes on each story that illustrate each tale’s journey from mouth to page, and what has happened to them on the way. These tales rank among the finest English short stories of all time in their richness of metaphor and plot and their great verbal dash and daring.
£14.99
Alma Books Ltd Sketches of Young Ladies, Young Gentlemen and Young Couples
When the publishers of the Pickwick Papers, Chapman & Hall, brought out the anonymous ‘Sketches of Young Ladies’ in 1837, their resounding success prompted the twenty-six-year old Dickens to write, the following year, a companion piece, the ‘Sketches of Young Gentlemen’, followed two years later – to coincide with the engagement of Princess Victoria and Prince Albert – by the ‘Sketches of Young Couples’. First published in a single volume in 1843, and including the iconic original engravings by Phiz, these satirical portraits not only reveal the dazzling brilliance of young Dickens’s genius, but also offer a humorous glimpse into Victorian mores and attitudes.
£8.50
Alianza Editorial Cancin de Navidad cuentos de fantasmas navideo
Relato de fantasmas que ha gozado del favor del público desde el mismo momento de su aparición, ? " Canción de Navidad? " (1843) narra la inquietante noche que en la víspera de esta festividad, y de resultas de la visita del espectro de su antiguo socio Jacob Marley, pasa Ebenezer Scrooge, anciano miserable y tacaño que, además de ser una de las más acabadas representaciones del avaro en la Literatura, es otro de los inolvidables personajes de la amplia galería dickensiana. Marley hace desfilar ante él la visión de los espíritus de la Navidades pasadas, presentes y futuras, imprimiendo así en su existencia una feliz transformación. La afortunada mezcla de lo sobrenatural, la caricatura, la inquietud social y el sentimiento conseguida en esta obra por Charles Dickens (1812-1870) hace que mantenga intacta aún hoy su capacidad para conmover y hacer disfrutar.
£12.62