Search results for ""Author Charles Dickens"

Secret Shepperton explores the history of the town from its early origins as an Iron Age settlement nestling on the banks of the River Thames. It’s the place where Caesar crossed the river in AD 54. Subsequent river finds reveal that this area regularly encountered invaders, such as the Saxons, who grazed sheep here and consequently called it Shepperton. It’s always been a place that attracts artists, such as Turner and Constable, and writers such as Charles Dickens and J. G. Ballard, who wrote the Unlimited Dream Factory in which his protagonist gains energy by phagocytizing the people of Shepperton. In H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the Martians destroy Shepperton and turn the Thames into a boiling inferno with their heat rays. In the twentieth century Shepperton was dubbed the playground of London and Richard D’Oyly Carte bought an island here to build a mini version of his Savoy Hotel. In 1931, Sir Richard Burbridge, Chairman of Harrods, sold his Shepperton mansion to Norman Loudon at a time when ‘the pictures’ were in their infancy but a new fad was catching on – films with sound. This was the forerunner of Shepperton Studio, still operating today and known throughout the world as the ‘Hollywood of England’.

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A powerful, uplifting and moving story of a teenage girl's battle against losing her sight and keeping her friendships.Mafalda is thirteen and has been blind since she was ten. Her best friend is the cheerfully rule-breaking Filippo, and she is accompanied everywhere by Ottimo Turcaret, her devoted cat. Mafalda is always looking on the bright side, thinking of things she can do both now and in the future despite her loss of sight. But other things are worrying her too: her father who has lost his job and is now in the depths of depression, refusing to leave his bed; and the horrible girl in school, Debbie, who seems very interested in Filippo . . . So now Mafalda has to start thinking what Filippo really means to her . . .Then two new adults come into her life: Elsa, a homeless young woman, and Nino, the elderly upstairs neighbour with an awful temper and a great passion for Charles Dickens. Little by little, Mafalda learns their stories, and how their lives had also been shaped by brave and difficult choices. A moving sequel to THE DISTANCE BETWEEN ME AND THE CHERRY TREE

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'I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific' Sarah Waters'If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man' Nick HornbyPatrick Hamilton's novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne's new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.West Kensington - grey area of rot, and caretaking, and cat-slinking basements. West Kensington - drab asylum for the driven and cast-off genteel!' Patrick Hamilton was acutely conscious that his third novel (first published in 1928) was longer and 'much grimmer' than his previous and well-received productions. Twopence Coloured is the story of nineteen-year-old Jackie Mortimer, who leaves Hove in search of a life on the London stage, only to become entangled in 'provincial theatre' and complex affairs of the heart with two brothers, Richard and Charles Gissing. The novel, unavailable for many years, is a gimlet-eyed portrait of the theatrical vocation, and fully exhibits Hamilton's celebrated gift for conjuring London - the 'vast, thronged, unknown, hooting, electric-lit, dark-rumbling metropolis.

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HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.Charles Dickens's classic tale of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge's encounters with the ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet to come.

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Dickens' celebrated novel of innocence betrayed and then triumphant. It recreates the London underworld populated by such characters as Fagin, Bill Sikes, Nancy and the Artful Dodger, who are contrasted with the friends and family of the orphaned Oliver.

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"Dom-bey and Son"...Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr. Dombey's life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. The hopes of Mr Dombey for the future of his shipping firm are centred on his delicate son Paul, and Florence, his devoted daughter, is unloved and neglected. When the firm faces ruin, and Dombey's second marriage ends in disaster, only Florence has the strength and humanity to save her father from desolate solitude. This new edition contains Dickens's prefaces, his working plans, and all the original illustrations by 'Phiz'. The text is that of the definitive Clarendon edition. It has been supplemented by a wide-ranging Introduction, highlighting Dickens's engagement with his times, and the touching exploration of family relationships which give the novel added depth and relevance. The Notes and Bibliography have been substantially revised, extended, and updated. 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.

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Who is stalking Florence Nightingale and her nurses? Is it the legendary Beast of the Crimean, or someone closer to home? In 1855, Britain and France are fighting to keep the Russians from snatching the Crimean Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, and Nightingale, a wealthy young society woman, has made it her mission to improve the wretched conditions in the British military hospitals in Turkey-despite fierce objections from the male doctors around her. When young women start turning up dead, their mouths sewn shut with embroidered fabric roses, Inspector Charles Field (the real-life inspiration for Charles Dickens's Inspector Bucket in Bleak House) is sent from England to find the killer among the doctors, military men, journalists, and others swarming Turkey's famous Barrack Hospital. Here Field meets both the famous Nightingale as well as Nurse Jane Rolly, the woman who will become his wife, and as he races to protect them, the prime suspect takes his own life.Case closed. Or is it?Twelve years later, back in London, amid the turmoil surrounding the expansion of voting rights, women again start turning up dead, their mouths covered by that telltale embroidered rose. Did Field suspect the wrong man before, or is he dealing with a deviant copycat? Either way, he must race against time to stop the killer before more bodies are discovered, and before his own family gets pulled into danger. Populated by real figures of the day, from Benjamin Disraeli to novelist Wilkie Collins to, of course, Florence Nightingale herself, and steeped in historical details of 1860s London, The Nightingale Affair plays out against a backdrop of a rapidly changing society. Most of all, it is a pure reading delight, offering shocks, unforgettably vivid scenes, and surprising twists.

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Shoreham airport, founded in 1910, is the oldest airport in the UK and the oldest purpose-built commercial airport in the world. Yet aviation began in Sussex far earlier, with balloonists making landfall at Kingsfold near Horsham in 1785. These early activities attracted much attention, with some 30,000 people gathering at Black Rock in Brighton, as well as on the surrounding hills, to watch the first balloon ascent from the town in July 1821 - using coal gas from the recently opened gas works. That particular balloonist, Charles Green, later became immortalised by Charles Dickens in his _Sketches By Boz_. The military were quick to appreciate the potential benefits of aerial observation and in 1880 balloons were deployed for the first time at the annual Volunteer Review at Brighton. Often wind conditions were not favourable for balloons, which prompted the army to consider employing kites and in June 1903 an international competition was held on the South Downs near Findon to see if kites could lift a man into the air. While this was found to be possible, it proved a terrifying experience for the unfortunate pilots. Before powered flight became a reality, it was gliders which were the first heavier than air machines to take to the skies. In 1902 Mr Jose Weiss began launching unmanned gliders off a ramp at Houghton Hill near Amberley, which flew up to two miles. But soon the internal combustion engine made powered, controlled flight a reality and on 7 November 1908, Alec Ogilvie flew a Wright Brothers biplane along the coast at Camber. By the time war broke out in 1914, the people of Sussex had seen the Brooklands to Brighton air race and the establishment of flying schools at Shoreham and Eastbourne. After the Armistice, aviation started becoming increasingly expensive and increasingly regulated. The halcyon days of swashbuckling amateurs taking to the skies in untested contraptions was drawing to a close.

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'In Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached' George OrwellA masterly evocation of the state and psychology of imprisonment, Little Dorrit is one of the supreme works of Dickens's maturity. It follows Arthur Clennam who, returning to England after many years abroad, takes a kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother's seamstress, who was born and raised in the Marshalsea where her father has long been imprisoned for debt. As Arthur soon discovers, the dark shadow of the prison stretches far beyond its walls to affect the lives of many, from the kindly Mr Pancks, the reluctant rent-collector of Bleeding Heart Yard, to the bureaucratic Barnacles in the Circumlocution Office and Merdle, an unscrupulous financier. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Stephen Wall and Helen Small

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A pictorial history of Birmingham Town Hall, showing the many events, occasions and people to which it has played host. Birmingham's magnificent Town Hall has hosted events of every kind and variety during its long life. Now, after a 35m refurbishment and restored to the original 1834 design, it reopens in October 2007 - an occasion which this pictorial history commemorates. Lavishly illustrated with some 250 pictures, it recalls many of the astonishing events and occasions that the Hall has witnessed in its 173-year history. These range from royal visits by Queen Victoriaand subsequent monarchs, outsize banquets, usage in wartime, legendary speakers including Charles Dickens and the many famous personalities of each decade, even a riot. The Hall's amazingly rich musical history is also traced, from the days when Mendelssohn, Dvorak and Elgar conducted their new works in person, through appearances by every international musician of subsequent decades right through the phenomena of all night jazz and the coming of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, to its temporary closure in 1996.

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The most inspiring, beautiful and though-provoking reflections and declarations of love, all in one place.From Shakespeare's sonnets to the rom coms of modern-day cinema, Enlightenment philosophy to the latest Nicholas Sparks novel, one could say that no other topic has inspired such beauty – in art, literature, poetry or music – than that of love.In The Little Book of Love the words of civil rights activists sit alongside those of movie stars, world leaders and the philosophers of Ancient Greece. In its pages you will find some hard-won lovers' wisdom, a whole host of poignant and inspiring reflections on love, as well as some of the most famous, endearing and enduring declarations of love ever spoken.'Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken...' William Shakespeare, 'Sonnet 116''I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.' Pip, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1860)'With the whole world crumbling, we pick this time to fall in love.' Ilsa Lund, Casablanca (1942)

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The 1854 text, edited by Sylvère Monod, is accompanied here by explanatory footnotes. Contextual pieces by critics and theorists of Dickens’ time bring readers examples of their views on industrialism, education and utilitarianism. Included are eight new critical essays.

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Opened in 1837 and inspired by the Pere Lachaise in Paris, West Norwood became known as the Millionaire's Cemetery. But within its opulent grounds there are twelve buried names whose currency is language: these are the dead poets of West Norwood. In the first instalment of a project to map the Magnificent Seven, Chris McCabe takes us off the main track of London writing and asks why the works of Hopkins, Tennyson and Browning are still read above those buried in this suburban enclave of South London. Join McCabe on the hunt for a great lost poet, as he walks the winding Gothic paths of the Cemetery and makes an unexpected discovery underground in the catacombs. The stories of those loved and dismissed by Charles Dickens are carefully uncovered; those who influenced Lewis Carroll and Winston Churchill; and those whose burial in the common ground has not been enough to silence them. A startling and original work of literary detection, In the Catacombs is written across a range of forms - prose, Gothic fiction, criticism and poetry - and places West Norwood Cemetery and its dead poets back into the foreground of the London psyche.

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The enclosure of the commons, space once available for communal use, was not a singular event but an act of "slow violence" that transformed lands, labor, and basic concepts of public life leading into the nineteenth century. The Afterlife of Enclosure examines three canonical British writers—Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy—as narrators of this history, the long duration and diffuse effects of which required new literary forms to capture the lived experience of enclosure and its aftermath. This study boldly reconceives the realist novel, not as an outdated artifact, but as witness to the material and environmental dispossession of enclosure—and bearer of utopian energies. These writers reinvented a commons committed to the collective nature of the social world. Illuminating the common at the heart of the novel—from common characters to commonplace events—Carolyn Lesjak reveals an experimental figuration of the lost commons, once a defining feature of the British landscape and political imaginary. In the face of privatization, climate change, new enclosures, and the other forms of slow violence unfolding globally today, this book looks back to a literature of historical trauma and locates within it a radical path forward.

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Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first published. Dickens's tale of childhood innocence beset by evil depicts the dark criminal underworld of a London peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery.

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'What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?' Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostly visitor foretells three apparitions who will thaw Scrooge's frozen heart. A Christmas Carol has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe or plum pudding. This edition reprints the story alongside Dickens's four other Christmas Books: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. All five stories show Dickens at his unpredictable best, jumbling together comedy and melodrama, genial romance and urgent social satire, in pursuit of his aim 'to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land'.

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"Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night," wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today - home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun's down. If nightwalking is a matter of "going astray" in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city.In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets.With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night and the people they meet.

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Life in a workhouse during the Victorian and Edwardian eras has been popularly characterised as a brutal existence. Charles Dickens famously portrayed workhouse inmates as being dirty, neglected, overworked and at the mercy of exploitative masters. While there were undoubtedly establishments that conformed to this stereotype, there is also evidence of a more enlightened approach that has not yet come to public attention. This book establishes a true picture of what life was like in a workhouse, of why inmates entered them and of what they had to endure in their day-to-day routine.A comprehensive overview of the workshouse system gives a real and compelling insight into social and moral reasons behind their growth in the Victorian era, while the kind of distinctions that were drawn between inmates are looked into, which, along with the social stigma of having been a workhouse inmate, tell us much about class attitudes of the time.The book also looks at living conditions and duties of the staff who, in many ways, were prisoners of the workhouse. Michelle Higgs combines thorough research with a fresh outlook on a crucial period in British history, and in doing so paints a vivid portrait of an era and its social standards that continues to fascinate, and tells us much about the society we live in today.

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Setting off on foot from Winchester, Ken Haigh hikes across southern England, retracing one of the traditional routes that medieval pilgrims followed to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Walking in honour of his father, a staunch Anglican who passed away before they could begin their trip together, Haigh wonders: Is there a place in the modern secular world for pilgrimage? On his journey, he sorts through his own spiritual aimlessness while crossing paths with writers like Anthony Trollope, John Keats, Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, and, of course, Geoffrey Chaucer. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part literary history, On Foot to Canterbury is engaging and delightful. “My father didn’t need this walk, not the way I do. For him it would have been a fun way to spend some time with his son. He had, I begin to realize, a talent for living in the moment… Perhaps a pilgrimage would help me find happiness. Perhaps I could walk my way into a better frame of mind, and somehow along the road to Canterbury I would find a new purpose for my life. It was worth a shot.” Audio edition from PRH available from Audible, Kobo, Google, and Apple Books.

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Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period. Though far from ubiquitous, the terms "child-woman", "child-man", and "old-fashioned child" appears often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post - Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility. She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser - known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture. By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, "Precocious Children and Childish Adults" illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children's literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.

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The implicit link between white women and "the dark races" recurs persistently in nineteenth-century English fiction. Imperialism at Home examines the metaphorical use of race by three nineteenth-century women novelists: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot. Susan Meyer argues that each of these domestic novelists uses race relations as a metaphor through which to explore the relationships between men and women at home in England. In the fiction of, for example, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, as in nineteenth-century culture more generally, the subtle and not-so-subtle comparison of white women and people of color is used to suggest their mutual inferiority. The Bronte sisters and George Eliot responded to this comparison, Meyer contends, transforming it for their own purposes. Through this central metaphor, these women novelists work out a sometimes contentious relationship to established hierarchies of race and gender. Their feminist impulses, in combination with their use of race as a metaphor, Meyer argues, produce at times a surprising, if partial, critique of empire. Through readings of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, and Charlotte Brontë's African juvenilia, Meyer traces the aesthetically and ideologically complex workings of the racial metaphor. Her analysis is supported by careful attention to textual details and thorough grounding in recent scholarship on the idea of race, and on literature and imperialism.

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The implicit link between white women and "the dark races" recurs persistently in nineteenth-century English fiction. Imperialism at Home examines the metaphorical use of race by three nineteenth-century women novelists: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot. Susan Meyer argues that each of these domestic novelists uses race relations as a metaphor through which to explore the relationships between men and women at home in England. In the fiction of, for example, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, as in nineteenth-century culture more generally, the subtle and not-so-subtle comparison of white women and people of color is used to suggest their mutual inferiority. The Bronte sisters and George Eliot responded to this comparison, Meyer contends, transforming it for their own purposes. Through this central metaphor, these women novelists work out a sometimes contentious relationship to established hierarchies of race and gender. Their feminist impulses, in combination with their use of race as a metaphor, Meyer argues, produce at times a surprising, if partial, critique of empire. Through readings of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, and Charlotte Brontë's African juvenilia, Meyer traces the aesthetically and ideologically complex workings of the racial metaphor. Her analysis is supported by careful attention to textual details and thorough grounding in recent scholarship on the idea of race, and on literature and imperialism.

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Introduction and Notes by Dr T.C.B. Cook Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz). Following the success of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby was hailed as a comic triumph and firmly established Dickens as a 'literary gentleman'. It has a full supporting cast of delectable characters that range from the iniquitous Wackford Squeers and his family, to the delightful Mrs Nickleby, taking in the eccentric Crummles and his travelling players, the Mantalinis, the Kenwigs and many more. Combining these with typically Dickensian elements of burlesque and farce, the novel is eminently suited to dramatic adaptation. So great was the impact as it left Dickens' pen that many pirated versions appeared in print before the original was even finished. Often neglected by critics, Nicholas Nickleby has never ceased to delight readers and is widely regarded as one of the greatest comic masterpieces of nineteenth-centure literature.

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No matter how hard we try, we just can’t get out. It’s like we are not allowed to. Some give up and say, “alright then, if you won’t give, I will bloody well take.” And you know what Shona, I don’t blame them. Shona and her class are studying the Charles Dickens classic, Oliver Twist. She’s the new girl in school and is finding it hard to stay out of trouble – much like Oliver himself! When she’s given a new phone by a stranger, she begins to suspect there’s something unusual about the new boys she’s met. Unexpected Twist is a re-telling of Oliver Twist by one of the best-loved figures in the children’s book world, Michael Rosen. This thrilling story was brought to vivid life by The Children’s Theatre Partnership, and Royal & Derngate, Northampton, whose co-productions have included Holes and The Jungle Book. Directed by James Dacre (2020 Olivier Award nominated Our Lady of Kibeho), Rosen’s novel was adapted for the stage by BAFTA award-winning playwright Roy Williams (Death of England, Sucker Punch) with original music by rising R&B star Yaya Bey and BAC Beatbox Academy’s Conrad Murray. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere and UK tour, in April 2023.

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The Victorians excelled at telling ghost stories. In an age of rapid scientific progress the idea of a vindictive past able to reach out and violate the present held a special potential for terror. Throughout the nineteenth century fictional ghost stories developed in parallel with the more general Victorian fascination with death and what lay beyond it. Though they were as much a part of the cultural and literary fabric of the age as imperial confidence, the best of them still retain their original power to surprise and unsettle. The editors map out the development of the ghost story from 1850 to the early years of the twentieth century and demonstrate the importance of this form of short fiction in Victorian popular culture. As well as reprinting stories by supernatural specialists such as J. S. Le Fanu and M. R. James, this selection also emphasizes the key role played by women writers - Elizabeth Gaskell, Mrs Craik, Rhoda Broughton, and Charlotte Riddell, among many others - and offers one or two genuine rarities for the supernatural fiction enthusiast to savour. Other writers represented include Charles Dickens, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and R. L. Stevenson. The editors also provide a fascinating introduction, detailed source notes, and a chronological list of ghost stories collections from 1850 to 1910.

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This book takes a fascinating look at the iconic figure of the Native American in the British cultural imagination from the Revolutionary War to the early twentieth century, and examining how Native Americans regarded the British, as well as how they challenged their own cultural image in Britain during this period. Kate Flint shows how the image of the Indian was used in English literature and culture for a host of ideological purposes, and she reveals its crucial role as symbol, cultural myth, and stereotype that helped to define British identity and its attitude toward the colonial world.Through close readings of writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and D. H. Lawrence, Flint traces how the figure of the Indian was received, represented, and transformed in British fiction and poetry, travelogues, sketches, and journalism, as well as theater, paintings, and cinema. She describes the experiences of the Ojibwa and Ioway who toured Britain with George Catlin in the 1840s; the testimonies of the Indians in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show; and the performances and polemics of the Iroquois poet Pauline Johnson in London. Flint explores transatlantic conceptions of race, the role of gender in writings by and about Indians, and the complex political and economic relationships between Britain and America.The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930 argues that native perspectives are essential to our understanding of transatlantic relations in this period and the development of transnational modernity.

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Two interesting items: The author's article in New York Archives A letter regarding foundlings in The Riverdale Press In the nineteenth century, foundlings—children abandoned by their desperately poor, typically unmarried mothers, usually shortly after birth—were commonplace in European society. There were asylums in every major city to house abandoned babies, and writers made them the heroes of their fiction, most notably Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. In American cities before the Civil War the situation was different, with foundlings relegated to the poorhouse instead of institutions designed specifically for their care. By the eve of the Civil War, New York City in particular had an epidemic of foundlings on its hands due to the rapid and often interlinked phenomena of urban development, population growth, immigration, and mass poverty. Only then did the city's leaders begin to worry about the welfare and future of its abandoned children. In Abandoned, Julie Miller offers a fascinating, frustrating, and often heartbreaking history of a once devastating, now forgotten social problem that wracked America's biggest metropolis, New York City. Filled with anecdotes and personal stories, Miller traces the shift in attitudes toward foundlings from ignorance, apathy, and sometimes pity for the children and their mothers to that of recognition of the problem as a sign of urban moral decline and in need of systematic intervention. Assistance came from public officials and religious reformers who constructed four institutions: the Nursery and Child's Hospital's foundling asylum, the New York Infant Asylum, the New York Foundling Asylum, and the public Infant Hospital, located on Randall's Island in the East River. Ultimately, the foundling asylums were unable to significantly improve children’s lives, and by the early twentieth century, three out of the four foundling asylums had closed, as adoption took the place of abandonment and foster care took the place of institutions. Today the word foundling has been largely forgotten. Fortunately, Abandoned rescues its history from obscurity.

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When Peter Minuit bought Manhattan for $24 in 1626 he showed his shrewdness by also buying the oyster beds off tiny, nearby Oyster Island, renamed Ellis Island in 1770. From the Minuit purchase until pollution finally destroyed the beds in the 1920s, New York was a city known for its oysters, especially in the late 1800s, when Europe and America enjoyed a decades-long oyster craze. In a dubious endorsement, William Makepeace Thackeray said that eating a New York oyster was like eating a baby. Travellers to New York were also keen to experience the famous New York oyster houses. While some were known for their elegance, due to a longstanding belief in the aphrodisiac quality of oysters, they were often associated with prostitution. In 1842, when the novelist Charles Dickens arrived in New York, he could not conceal his eagerness to find and experience the fabled oyster cellars of New York City's slums. The Big Oyster is the story of a city and of an international trade.Filled with cultural, social and culinary insight - as well as recipes, maps, drawings and photographs - this is history at its most engrossing, entertaining and delicious.

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One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''The great poet of the city. He was created by London' Peter AckroydOur Mutual Friend centres on an inheritance - Old Harmon's profitable dust heaps - and its legatees: young John Harmon, presumed drowned when a body is pulled out of the Thames, and kindly dustman Mr Boffin, to whom the fortune defaults. With brilliant satire, Dickens portrays a dark, macabre London, inhabited by such disparate characters as Gaffer Hexam, scavenging the river for corpses; enchanting, mercenary Bella Wilfer; the social-climbing Veneerings; and the unscrupulous street-trader Silas Wegg. Dickens's last completed novel is richly symbolic in its vision of death and renewal in a city dominated by the fetid Thames, and of the corrupting power of money.Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Adrian Poole

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'Enlivens the standard tale of swashbuckling adventure, adding feminist spice ... Rich and immersive' SUNDAY TIMES HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH'Remarkable' HILARY MANTEL'A vivid, narrative-packed splice of historical fiction' DAILY MAILA Wild & True Relation opens during the Great Storm of 1703, as smuggler Tom West confronts his lover Grace for betraying him to the Revenue. Leaving Grace's cottage in flames, he takes her orphaned daughter Molly on board ship disguised as a boy to join his crew. But Molly, or Orlando as she must call herself, will grow up to outshine all the men of Tom's company and seek revenge - and a legacy - all of her own. Woven into Molly's story are the writers - from Celia Fiennes and George Eliot to Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens - who are transfixed by her myth and who, over three centuries, come together to solve the mystery of her life. With extraordinary verve , Sherwood remakes the eighteenth-century novel and illuminates women's writing and women's roles throughout history.'Breathlessly swashbuckling' DAILY TELEGRAPH'Vividly imagined, relentlessly entertaining, rich and resonant in scope and context, it's both a thrilling adventure and a vital witness to women's voices' EMMA STONEX, author of The Lamplighters'A young writer of immense talent' ANDREW MILLER'A breathtaking feat of historical fiction and utterly astounding. It is wise, urgent and entirely compelling. I was bereft when it ended' WYL MENMUIR'This book is a rarity - a novel as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication' HILARY MANTEL'A thrilling adventure novel' FIONA MOZLEY

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FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WHAT I LOVED AND A WOMAN LOOKING AT MEN LOOKING AT WOMEN'A luminous collection of mind-expanding pieces on literary and philosophical themes . . . A book to renew one's faith in the literary essay' Robert McCrum, Observer'Thoughtful, sensuous essays . . . her enthusiasms are oddly infectious' Daily TelegraphIn this illuminating and absorbing collection of essays, Siri Hustvedt explores many of the themes that preoccupy her novels: identity and memory, sexuality and mortality, psychology, love and the power of imagination. But here she offers her personal experience - as daughter, sister, mother and wife, student, reader and writer - to illustrate fundamental aspects of our lives as individuals and social beings in the modern world. She draws, too, on the work of Henry James, F Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Dickens, probing their insights into human nature.Wise, honest and luminously intelligent, this is a book that invites us to look afresh at ourselves and the universe we inhabit.'One of the most talented voices in contemporary fiction . . . Hustvedt brings the same visual power, sensuality and intelligence to her collection of essays' Los Angeles Times Book ReviewPRAISE FOR SIRI HUSTVEDT:'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom' Salman Rushdie'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear' Hilary Mantel'Her novels have received a deserved acclaim. But to my mind, she is even more to be admired as an essayist . . . in this regard I feel that she resembles Virginia Woolf ' Observer'Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt' Washington Post

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A curious gem of 19th-century gothic fiction Cecil Dreeme is one of the queerest American novels of the 19th century. This edition, which includes a new introduction contextualizing the sexual history of the period and queer longings of the book, brings a rare, almost forgotten, sensational gothic novel set in New York’s West Village back to light. Published posthumously in 1861, the novel centers on Robert Byng, a young man who moves back to New York after traveling abroad and finds himself unmarried and underemployed, adrift in the heathenish dens of lower Manhattan. When he takes up rooms in “Chrysalis College”—a thinly veiled version of the 19th-century New York University building in Washington Square—he quickly finds himself infatuated with a young painter lodging there, named Cecil Dreeme. As their friendship grows and the novel unfolds against the backdrop of the bohemian West Village, Robert confesses that he “loves Cecil with a love passing the love of women.” Yet, there are dark forces at work in the form of the sinister and magnetic Densdeth, a charismatic figure of bad intention, who seeks to ensnare Robert for his own. Full of romantic entanglements, mistaken identity, blackmail, and the dramas of temptation and submission, Cecil Dreeme is a gothic novel at its finest. Poetically written—with flashes of Walt Whitman, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde—Cecil Dreeme is an early example of that rare bird, a queer novel from the 19th century.

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Michael Gove is one of the most recognisable faces in British politics - and one of the most divisive. Whether it's taking on the education `blob', acting as a frontman for the Brexit campaign or orchestrating one of the bloodiest political assassinations in the history of British politics, Gove is a man who makes things happen. But it was almost so different, and his story, from being born into care to standing for the leadership of the Conservative Party, could have come straight from the pages of a Charles Dickens novel. A charming man to his friends, and a cold-blooded zealot to his enemies, Gove provokes a reaction from everyone, be it loyalty, anger, respect or fury. Love him or hate him, it's impossible to deny Gove's impact on the UK over the past ten years, and, with Brexit still up in the air, he will continue to play a key role in the future of the country. Political journalist Owen Bennett's groundbreaking biography takes in original research as well as interviews with current and former Cabinet ministers, ex-colleagues from the BBC and The Times, and numerous other key players in Gove's life story. Lively and insightful in equal measure, Michael Gove: A Man in a Hurry reveals what turned the adopted son of an Aberdeen fishing family into one of the key political figures of the decade.

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From spooky stories and real-life ghost hunting, to shows about murder and serial killers, we are fascinated by death - and we owe these modern obsessions to the Victorian age. Death and the Victorians explores a period in history when the search for the truth about what lies beyond our mortal realm was matched only by the imagination and invention used to find it. Walk among London’s festering graveyards, where the dead were literally rising from the grave. Visit the Paris Morgue, where thousands flocked to view the spectacle of death every single day. Lift the veil on how spirits were invited into the home, secret societies taught ways to survive death, and the latest science and technology was applied to provide proof of the afterlife. Find out why the Victorian era is considered the golden age of the ghost story, exemplified by tales from the likes of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde and Henry James. Discover how the birth of the popular press nurtured our taste for murder and that Jack the Ripper was actually a work of pure Gothic horror fiction crafted by cynical Victorian newspapermen. Death and the Victorians exposes the darker side of the nineteenth century, a time when the living were inventing incredible ways to connect with the dead that endure to this day.

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Young Pip seems destined to follow in his family's humble footsteps. Then one day, an anonymous gift suddenly transforms him into a rich young man . . . but will it also transform his life for the better? Dickens's great bildungsroman, featuring iconic characters like Miss Havisham, is an enduring favorite in schools,libraries, and homes.

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The field of lesbian studies is often framed in terms of the relation between lesbianism and invisibility. Annamarie Jagose here takes a radical new approach, suggesting that the focus on invisibility and visibility is perhaps not the most productive way of looking at lesbian representability. Jagose argues that the theoretical preoccupation with metaphors of visibility is part of the problem it attempts to remedy. In her account, the regulatory difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality relies less on codes of visual recognition than on a cultural adherence to the force of first order, second order sexual sequence. As Jagose points out, sequence does not simply specify what comes before and what comes after; it also implies precedence: what comes first and what comes second. Jagose reads canonical novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Daphne du Maurier, drawing upon their elaboration of sexual sequence. In these innovative readings, tropes such as first and second, origin and outcome, and heterosexuality and homosexuality are shown to reinforce heterosexual precedence. Inconsequence intervenes in current debates in lesbian historiography, taking as its pivotal moment the fin-de-siècle phenomenon of the sexological codification of sexual taxonomies and concluding with a reading of a post-Kinsey pulp sexological text. Throughout, Jagose reminds us that categories of sexual registration are always back-formations, secondary, and belated, not only for those who identify as lesbian but also for all sexual subjects.

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Night Boat to New York: Steamboats on the Connecticut, 1824-1931, is a portrait of the vanished steamboat days–when a procession of stately sidewheelers plied between Hartford and New York City, docking at Peck’s Slip on the East River in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. At one time, Hartford could boast two thousand steamboat arrivals and departures in a year. Altogether, some thirty-five large steamboats were in service on the Connecticut River in these years, largely on the Hartford to New York City route. These Long Island Sound steamers, unlike the tubby, wedding cake dowagers of Western waters, were long, sleek craft, with sharp prows cutting a neat wake as they cruised along. Departing each afternoon from State Street or Talcott Street wharf in Hartford, the “night boats” reached New York at daybreak, inaugurating a pattern of city commuting that continues to this day. Steamboating not only brought people and goods—Colt’s firearms and Essex’s pianos—down river to New York for export to world markets, but also helped America’s inland “spa Culture” transplant itself to the seashore, making steamboating not just convenient transportation but also a social phenomenon noted by such writers as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. No wonder crowds wept in the fall of 1931, when the last steamboats, made obsolete by the automobile, churned away from the dock and headed downriver—never to return.

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The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates’ courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat “private” family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists’ engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century. Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads Dombey and Son and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot’s Janet’s Repentance in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right. Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. Bleak Houses thus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home.

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'We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.' - W. Somerset Maugham The Victorian era boasted the glory of the Empire and the grandeur that Empire afforded, it saw huge technological advances in civil engineering and transport, mass urbanisation and social change, as well as still-treasured literature and the most popular sports that we play today. But it was also a time of great poverty, of mass child labour and prostitution, of the Irish Potato Famine and British concentration camps in the Boer War, of the boom and bust of the California Gold Rush and slavery being fought over in America, of sexual hypocrisy and rigid class differences. The Victorians explores the Victorian world from its cholera epidemics and asylums to its workhouses and chimneysweeps, from the Opium Wars to London’s opium dens, from the gangs of New York to convicts bound for Australia, from body-snatchers to freakshows, from the British in Afghanistan to the American Civil War, from imposters claiming fortunes to women pretending to be men. Included are the lives of such colourful figures as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, the Elephant Man and Jack the Ripper, and the world that inspired Dracula, detective stories and the character of Sherlock Holmes. Expertly written and using 180 photographs, paintings, and illustrations, The Victorians reveals that behind the splendour and the facades was a world of poverty, disease and hypocrisy, where fortunes could be quickly made – and swiftly lost.

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Introduction and Notes by Dinny Thorold, University of Westminster. Illustrated by F. Walker and Maurice Greiffenhagen. Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted environment. This is the soulless domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the heartless factory owner Josiah Bounderby. However human joy is not excluded thanks to 'Mr Sleary's Horse-Riding' circus, a gin-soaked and hilarious troupe of open-hearted and affectionate people who act as an antidote to all the drudgery and misery endured by the ordinary citizens of Coketown. Macaulay attacked Hard Times for its ‘sullen socialism’, but 20th-century critics such as George Bernard Shaw and F.R. Leavis have praised this book in the highest terms, while readers the world over have found inspiration and enjoyment from what is both Dickens’ shortest completed novel and also one of his important statements on Victorian society.

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A revelatory resituation of Van Gogh’s familiar works in the company of the surprising variety of nineteenth-century art and literature he most revered Vincent van Gogh’s (1853–1890) idiosyncratic style grew out of a deep admiration for and connection to the nineteenth-century art world. This fresh look at Van Gogh’s influences explores the artist’s relationship to the Barbizon School painters Jean-François Millet and Georges Michel—Van Gogh’s self-proclaimed mentors—as well as to Realists like Jean-François Raffaëlli and Léon Lhermitte. New scholarship offers insights into Van Gogh’s emulation of Adolphe Monticelli, his absorption of the Hague School through Anton Mauve and Jozef Israëls, and his keen interest in the work of the Impressionists. This copiously illustrated volume also discusses Van Gogh’s allegiance to the colorism of Eugène Delacroix, as well as his alliance with the Realist literature of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Although Van Gogh has often been portrayed as an insular and tortured savant, Through Vincent’s Eyes provides a fascinating deep dive into the artist’s sources of inspiration that reveals his expansive interest in the artistic culture of his time.Published in association with the Santa Barbara Museum of ArtPublished in association with the Santa Barbara Museum of ArtExhibition Schedule:Columbus Museum of Art (November 12, 2021–February 6, 2022)Santa Barbara Museum of Art (February 27–May 22, 2022)

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'What a brilliant Christmas gift' - Chris MoylesThe Sunday Times Bestseller'It is at Christmas time that want is most keenly felt, and abundance rejoices.'Charles Dickens'Yeah, and a partridge up your pear tree, an' all.'Derek Trotter_____________'What is it about me and Christmas?Amazingly, there are eighteen 'Only Fools and Horses' Christmas specials. It is at Christmas that Raquel moves in with Del, that Peckham Spring mineral water is first marketed, that the world's least likely Batman and Robin duo emerge on a foggy street.Think of this memoir, then, as a Christmas special in book form, from someone who has been involved in a few of those and understands a bit about the concept. But a Christmas special very much like Only Fools and Horses, in the sense that the stories will be always heading outwards, ranging far and wide and well beyond the traditional festive gags involving giblets left in turkeys.As I sift through various festive-related episodes in my career, loosening the ribbons, parting the wrapping paper, I'll be doing my best to reach any relevant conclusions about life, work and the meaning of it all that I can usefully pass on to you - baubles of wisdom if you like. Or certainly baubles. You'll learn why I have the perfect face to play Scrooge. And if you're lucky I'll also share what it's like to fly in the helicopter of my old mucker Tom Cruise. Merry Christmas, you plonkers.'

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Maybe Jesus was joking, the disciples didn’t know what they were doing and the New Testament is a lot funnier than you might think. You would think it weird if someone suddenly ascended into heaven, right? Reading between the lines, do we detect a touch of rivalry between Peter and John? And surely the lack of parables in the latter’s mystical tome is simply crying out to be redressed . . . In this sparklingly witty book, BBC sitcom writer James Cary gives us a new and liberating way of looking at the gospel as he entertainingly relates it to a modern context, with references ranging from Charles Dickens to The Vicar of Dibley. Cheerfully playing around with the text, he takes the Bible seriously but allows us to laugh at our own petty vanities and foibles – and be enlightened in the process. The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer is ideal for anyone wanting to liven up their Bible reading and looking for new ways to be thrilled by this sacred text. It’s also perfect for priests, pastors, youth leaders and all those involved in ministry and giving sermons, as James Cary shows using comedy and humour is a brilliant way to communicate the gospel. Warm, funny and full of brilliant insight and Christian humour, The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer will make you laugh out loud and shake your head in awe. You’ll never read the Bible the same way again.

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This brilliantly coloured tale of the French Revolution is an historical romance set in Paris and London. Famous for the character of Sidney Carton who sacrifices himself upon the guillotine' it is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done '- the novel is also a powerful study of crowd psychology and the dark emotions aroused by the Revolution, illuminated by Dickens' lively comedy

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Key Stage 2 Comprehension provides a unique collection of stimulating texts that appeal strongly to both boys and girls, together with questions that both build and stretch comprehension skills and widen vocabulary. Comprising four one-per-child activity books and providing more than 72 texts in total, the series encourages children to pay close attention to literal meaning, make inferences and deductions, observe how writing is structured and identify literary devices. A separate Teacher's Guide is also available. Book 4 reflects the broadening interests and word power of young people who will soon move to secondary school, or have now done so. It includes: non-fiction texts covering the discovery in Russia of a long-extinct mammoth, shells and their origins and the life of explorer Robert Scott, the poignant 'last letter' from Scott to his widow, classic poetry from Rudyard Kipling, Edward Thomas, Edward Lear and William Wordsworth, a short extract from the play 'Hamlet' by William Shakespeare, riveting fiction from R.L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens and absorbing autobiographies and biographical fiction from Roald Dahl and Alison Prince.

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A curious gem of 19th-century gothic fiction Cecil Dreeme is one of the queerest American novels of the 19th century. This edition, which includes a new introduction contextualizing the sexual history of the period and queer longings of the book, brings a rare, almost forgotten, sensational gothic novel set in New York’s West Village back to light. Published posthumously in 1861, the novel centers on Robert Byng, a young man who moves back to New York after traveling abroad and finds himself unmarried and underemployed, adrift in the heathenish dens of lower Manhattan. When he takes up rooms in “Chrysalis College”—a thinly veiled version of the 19th-century New York University building in Washington Square—he quickly finds himself infatuated with a young painter lodging there, named Cecil Dreeme. As their friendship grows and the novel unfolds against the backdrop of the bohemian West Village, Robert confesses that he “loves Cecil with a love passing the love of women.” Yet, there are dark forces at work in the form of the sinister and magnetic Densdeth, a charismatic figure of bad intention, who seeks to ensnare Robert for his own. Full of romantic entanglements, mistaken identity, blackmail, and the dramas of temptation and submission, Cecil Dreeme is a gothic novel at its finest. Poetically written—with flashes of Walt Whitman, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde—Cecil Dreeme is an early example of that rare bird, a queer novel from the 19th century.

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'An absolutely riveting book - reading it makes you intelligent, full of brilliant anecdotes - and very hungry indeed.' - Richard Curtis 'This brilliantly conceived and well-researched book is a source of real delight.' - Dr Annie Gray, BBC Radio 4's The Kitchen Cabinet 'Superbly written, a complete joy to read, and just about the perfect present for anyone even vaguely interested in food.' - Mark Diacono'A gastronomic delight. You can savour it a course at a time, or you may consume the whole banquet in one sitting. It's delicious either way - utterly scrumptious, in fact!' - Mike LeighThis fascinating miscellany of menus from around the world will educate as well as entertain, delighting both avid foodies and the general reader.Each menu provides an insight into its particular historical moment - from the typical food on offer in a nineteenth-century workhouse to the opulence of George IV's gargantuan coronation dinner. Some menus are linked with a specific and unforgettable event such as The Hindenburg's last flight menu or the variety of meals on offer for First, Second and Third Class passengers on board RMS Titanic, while others give an insight into sport, such as the 1963 FA Cup Final Dinner or transport and travel with the luxury lunch on board the Orient Express. Also included are literary occasions like Charles' Dickens 1868 dinner at Delmonicos in New York as well as the purely fictional and fantastical fare of Ratty's picnic in The Wind in the Willows.

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Board: AQA Examination: English Language & Literature Specification: GCSE 9-1 Set Text covered: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens Type: Revision Cards New GCSE Grades 9-1 Revision Cards with free revision app, perfect to support your revision for the closed book AQA GCSE English Literature exam. Perfect for last-minute revision; Clear information with at-a-glance chronology of the text A tight focus on key events, characters, themes, context, language and structure. With lots of quiz cards to help you demonstrate your knowledge and understanding you can't go wrong. These cards can be used alongside our best-selling Study Guides with matching colour coded sections or they can be used independently as a stand-alone revision resource. Snap it! Read it, snap it on your phone, revise it...helps you retain key facts The accompanying free app uses cutting-edge technology to help you revise on-the-go to: Use the free, personalised digital revision planner and get stuck into the quick tests to check your understanding Download our free revision cards which you can save to your phone to help you revise on the go Implement 'active' revision techniques - giving you lots of tips and tricks to help the knowledge sink in

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