Search results for ""Author Charles Dickens"

'Show me another pleasure like dinner which comes every day and lasts an hour.' – Talleyrand 'He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.' – Jonathan Swift ‘There is no love sincerer than the love of food’ wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1903. Poets, novelists, chefs and gourmands before and after him would seem to agree. Collected in this anthology is a mouth-watering selection of excerpts on the subject of eating, drinking, cooking and serving food, guaranteed to whet every reader’s appetite. Themed sections group together poetry and prose on grapes and bottles, the ideal cuisine, hangover cures and vivid vignettes of dinner-party behaviour, including Mrs Gaskell eating peas with a knife. There are stories about food fit for kings, a duchess’s ‘rumblings abdominal’, fine dining, eating abroad, cooking at home and gastronomic excesses. A section on food and travel features Edmund Hillary’s meal at the summit of Everest, Ernest Shackleton’s dish of penguin in the Antarctic and Joshua Slocum on the unfortunate effects of cheese and plums while sailing solo around the world. Also on the menu are limericks, short-tempered cooks, recipes, fantasy food, special feasts, iron rations, tips on opening oysters and the uses and abuses of coffee. Featuring writers as diverse as Brillat-Savarin, Edward Lear, John Keats, Collette, Charles Dickens, Maria Edgeworth and Marcel Proust and interspersed with a generous helping of cartoons, this is a perfect gift for foodies, chefs, picnickers and epicurean explorers.

Read more less

Read the ultimate Christmas story of hope and redemption behind the recent BBC TV adaptationEbenezer Scrooge despises Christmas. He has no time for festivities or goodwill toward his fellow men and is only interested in money. Then, on the night of Christmas Eve, his life is changed by a series of ghostly visitations that show him some bitter truths about his choices. Discover Dickens's most influential book and one of the world’s favourite Christmas reads.INCLUDES 'THE CHIMES' AND 'THE HAUNTED MAN'

Read more less

It may not be the longest, deepest or widest river in the world but few bodies of water reveal as much about a nation's past and present, or are suggestive of its future, as England's River Thames. Tales of legendary lock-keepers and long-vanished weirs evoke the distant past of a river which evolved into a prime commercial artery linking the heart of England with the ports of Europe. In Victorian times, the Thames hosted regattas galore, its new bridges and tunnels were celebrated as marvels of their time, and London's river was transformed from sewer to centrepiece of the British Empire. Talk of the Thames Gateway and the effectiveness of the Thames Barrier keeps the river in the news today, while the lengthening Thames Path makes the waterway more accessible than ever before. Through quiet meadows, rolling hills, leafy suburbia, industrial sites and a changing London riverside, Mick Sinclair tracks the Thames from source to sea, documenting internationally-known landmarks such as Tower Bridge and Windsor Castle and revealing lesser known features such as Godstow Abbey, Canvey Island, the Sanford Lasher, and George Orwell's tranquil grave. PAINTINGS, WORDS AND MUSIC: Turner, Tissot, Whistler and Monet; Shakespeare at Southwark, Alexander Pope, Charles Dickens, Jerome K. Jerome, William Morris; Handel's Water Music, the first rendition of Rule Britannia, the Rolling Stones and The Who rocking Eel Pie Island. POWER, POLITICS AND INTRIGUE: Runnymede and Magna Carta, the first English parliament, Whitehall Palace, Cliveden and the Profumo affair, the Houses of Parliament and the brooding headquarters of MI5 and MI6. TRADE AND COMMERCE: Eel trapping, osier growing; bargemen, watermen and lightermen; the rise and fall of London's docks; urban regeneration, rural protection.

Read more less

The untold story of Point Frederick, where early nineteenth-century Canadians built warships that stopped invasion and brought peace.Warriors and Warships brings to life a much neglected part of Canada’s military history, covering the warships and the people who built them at Point Frederick from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Opposite Kingston, Point Frederick was the 1789 dockyard home of the Provincial Marine on Lake Ontario and the headquarters of Britain’s Royal Navy from 1813 to 1853. Today, it is the home of the Royal Military College of Canada. In this detailed narrative, with over one hundred colour archival maps, aerial views, photographs, and 3D reconstructions, Banks recounts Point Frederick’s building of great sail and steam warships and the roles these vessels played in conflict on Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and Niagara. Among the conflicts is the War of 1812, when French Canadian and British shipwrights made warships that forced the U.S. Navy into port and led to the American withdrawal from Canada. Banks also covers the role of the ships in the settlement of Upper Canada, the rebellion of 1837, the early planning of the Rideau Canal, and the beginning of the undefended border. Along the way, Banks introduces an array of people from Upper Canada, such as Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe and his wife, Elizabeth Posthuma; Governor General Lord Dorchester; General Isaac Brock; Sir James Yeo, and even Charles Dickens. He also describes the day-to-day activities at Point Frederick, beyond shipbuilding and military campaigns, such as skating parties, sleigh rides, theatricals, disease and death, and crime and punishment. Banks shares the moments of hardship, triumph, and tragedy of both the warriors and the warships in this important contribution to Canadian history.

Read more less

It's Christmas Eve and bad-tempered miser Ebeneezer Scrooge is in his counting-house, refusing offers to join in the festive merriment and instead forcing his long-suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit, to work in freezing conditions. A visitation from the chain-bound ghost of his dead colleague, Jacob Marley, warns him that he will soon be visited by three spirits. The events of the night are set to show Scrooge who he really is: but will this be enough to move his stubborn soul? This Essential Student Texts edition of Dickens's classic tale comes with accessible and informative notes.

Read more less

This study examines literary celebrity in Britain from 1850 to 1914. Through lively analysis of rare cultural materials, Easley demonstrates the crucial role of the celebrity author in the formation of British national identity. As Victorians toured the homes and haunts of famous writers, they developed a sense of shared national heritage. At the same time, by reading sensational accounts of writers’ lives, they were able to reconsider conventional gender roles and domestic arrangements. As women were featured in interviews and profiles, they were increasingly associated with the ephemerality of the popular press and were often excluded from emerging narratives of British literary history, which defined great literature as having a timeless appeal. Nevertheless, women writers were able to capitalize on celebrity media as a way of furthering their own careers and retelling history on their own terms. Press attention had a more positive effect on men’s literary careers since they were expected to assume public identities; however, in some cases, media exposure had the effect of sensationalizing their lives, bodies, and careers. With the development of proto-feminist criticism and historiography, the life stories of male writers were increasingly used to expose unhealthy domestic relationships and imagine ideal forms of British masculinity. The first section of Literary Celebrity explores the practice of literary tourism in Victorian Britain, focusing specifically on the homes and haunts of Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Harriet Martineau. This investigation incorporates analysis of fascinating cultural texts, including maps, periodicals, and tourist guidebooks. Easley links the practice of literary tourism to a variety of cultural developments, including nationalism, urbanization, spiritualism, the women’s movement, and the expansion of popular print culture. The second section provides fresh insight into the ways that celebrity culture informed the development of Victorian historiography. Easley demonstrates how women were able to re-tell history from a proto-feminist perspective by writing contemporary history, participating in architectural reform movements, and becoming active in literary societies. In this chapter she returns to the work of Harriet Martineau and introduces a variety of lesser-known contributors to the field, including Mary Gillies and Mary Ward. Literary Celebrity concludes with a third section focused on the expansion of celebrity media at the fin de siècle. These chapters and a brief coda link the popularization of celebrity news to the de-canonization of women writers, the professionalization of medicine, the development of the open space movement, and the institutionalization of English studies. These investigations elucidate the role of celebrity media in the careers of Charlotte Robinson, Marie Corelli, Mary Braddon, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Ernest Hart, and Octavia Hill. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Read more less

Immerse yourself in the intrigue and elegance of the Victorian era with this treasure trove of ephemera—with 500+ stickers, 90+ activity and coloring pages, and calling cards with envelopes. Whether you’re a sticker lover, scrapbooker, crafter, colorer, or letter writer, you’re sure to find something unique in Antiquities Sticker, Color & Activity Book. The Victorian era of the 19th century was known for many things. It brought us the telephone and telegraph, photographs and electricity, Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens, postage stamps and the Industrial Revolution. But it also ushered in a period of imperialism, the dawn of the suffragist movement, and a greater leisure class. Named after Queen Victoria, elements of the Victorian era were seen across Europe—and "across the pond” in the United States. Along with the growing leisure class came a rise in activities such as novel reading, parlor games, and puzzles. Now you, too, can partake in leisurely pastimes with this activity book’s: Exquisitely illustrated stickers, with subjects ranging from birds, animals, and plants to clothes, ornate furnishings, and objets d’art. Use them to decorate envelopes, gift wrap, letters, scrapbooks, photo albums, or the enclosed Victorian calling cards and envelopes that you can personalize. On the backs of the sticker pages are quotations from notable Victorians. Calling cards and easy-to-assemble envelopes. Similar to today’s business cards, calling (or, visiting) cards were carried by well-heeled people in the 18th and 19th centuries to present themselves to others or to leave behind when calling on someone. The cards could also be enclosed with a gift. Create your own by filling in your name, coloring in the designs, and adding stickers. Enchanting coloring pages, featuring line-drawn images of foxes, deer, and rabbits; swans, butterflies, and bees; and fruit, leaves, and summer bouquets. Each full-page design has a meditative pattern on the back that you can color in any way you like, regardless of your artistic abilities. You can even adorn your finished works of art with the stickers. Words games and activities, such as mazes, connect-the-dots, trivia, matching, Victorian name generator, and more! Period-specific pastimes, with instructions on how to read tea leaves and palms, press flowers, and create inkblot poetry. With so many pages to look at, so many things to do, and so much joy to be had in these pages, Antiquities Sticker, Color & Activity Book is the perfect book to have on hand when a free moment strikes. It’s also a darling gift for anyone who enjoys stickers, coloring, word games, and plain old fun.

Read more less

Pip is a poor orphan, a boy with “no expectations” being raised by his unkind sister and her husband in a small home on the marshes of Kent. But when Pip meets the bizarre Miss Havisham and her beautiful ward, Estella, he starts to yearn for a life as a gentleman. However, Pip will discover that wealth and honesty do not go hand in hand, and that kindness can be found in the most surprising places. A love story, a mystery, and a sharp critique of upper-class English society, Great Expectations remains one of Dickens’s best-regarded works.

Read more less

'The novel has everything: absorbing melodrama, with a supporting cast of heroes, villains and eccentrics' The TimesWhen Nicholas's father dies he, his mother and sister are left penniless. To earn his keep, Nicholas becomes a tutor at Dotheboys Hall but soon discovers that the headmaster, Wackford Squeers, is a one-eyed tyrant who insists on a harsh regime. Nicholas embarks on an adventure that takes him from loathsome boarding schools to the London stage. Dickens confronts issues of neglect and cruelty in this blackly comic masterpiece.

Read more less

'Dickens's chilling tale of murder and betrayal' Sunday Times 'The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself''Jarndyce and Jardyce' is an infamous lawsuit that has been in process for generations. Nobody can remember exactly how the case started but many different individuals have found their fortunes caught up in it. Esther Summerson watches as her friends and neighbours are consumed by their hopes and disappointments with the proceedings. But while the intricate puzzles of the lawsuit are being debated by lawyers, other more dramatic mysteries are unfolding that involve heartbreak, lost children, blackmail and murder.

Read more less

This Norton Critical Edition includes: The first edition of the novel (1859) accompanied by twenty-seven illustrations, from original images by Halbot Knight Browne (“Phiz”) to cartoons from The Simpsons. An expansive introduction and detailed explanatory annotations by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Thematically organised contextual materials designed to promote classroom discussion. Topics include “Dickens on France and the French”, “Revolution and Aftermath”, “Living Graves”, “Learning French”, “The Composition of A Tale of Two Cities” and “Theatrical Versions”. Fourteen major critical assessments of A Tale of Two Cities: five contemporary reviews and nine modern essays. A chronology and a selected bibliography.

Read more less

An entertaining mathematical exploration of the heat equation and its role in the triumphant development of the trans-Atlantic telegraph cableHeat, like gravity, shapes nearly every aspect of our world and universe, from how milk dissolves in coffee to how molten planets cool. The heat equation, a cornerstone of modern physics, demystifies such processes, painting a mathematical picture of the way heat diffuses through matter. Presenting the mathematics and history behind the heat equation, Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons tells the remarkable story of how this foundational idea brought about one of the greatest technological advancements of the modern era.Paul Nahin vividly recounts the heat equation’s tremendous influence on society, showing how French mathematical physicist Joseph Fourier discovered, derived, and solved the equation in the early nineteenth century. Nahin then follows Scottish physicist William Thomson, whose further analysis of Fourier’s explorations led to the pioneering trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. This feat of engineering reduced the time it took to send a message across the ocean from weeks to minutes. Readers also learn that Thomson used Fourier’s solutions to calculate the age of the earth, and, in a bit of colorful lore, that writer Charles Dickens relied on the trans-Atlantic cable to save himself from a career-damaging scandal. The book’s mathematical and scientific explorations can be easily understood by anyone with a basic knowledge of high school calculus and physics, and MATLAB code is included to aid readers who would like to solve the heat equation themselves.A testament to the intricate links between mathematics and physics, Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons offers a fascinating glimpse into the relationship between a formative equation and one of the most important developments in the history of human communication.

Read more less

Before phonographs and moving pictures, live performances dominated American popular entertainment. Carnivals, circuses, dioramas, magicians, mechanical marvels, musicians, and theatrical troupes-all visited rural fairgrounds, small-town opera houses, and big-city palaces around the country, giving millions of people an escape from their everyday lives for a dime or a quarter. In From Traveling Show to Vaudeville, Robert M. Lewis has assembled a remarkable collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century primary sources that document America's age of theatrical spectacle. In eight parts, Lewis explores, in turn, dime museums, minstrelsy, circuses, melodramas, burlesque shows, Wild West shows, amusement parks, and vaudeville. Included in this compendium are biographies, programs, ephemera produced by theatrical entrepreneurs to lure audiences to their shows, photographs, scripts, and song lyrics as well as newspaper accounts, reviews, and interviews with such figures as P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody. Lewis also gives us reminiscences about and reactions to various shows by members of audiences, including such prominent writers as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, O. Henry, and Maxim Gorky. Each section also includes a concise introduction that places the genre of spectacle into its historical and cultural context and suggests major interpretive themes. The book closes with a bibliographic essay that identifies relevant scholarly works. Many of the pieces collected here have not been published since their first appearance, making From Traveling Show to Vaudeville an indispensable resource for historians of popular culture, theater, and nineteenth-century American society.

Read more less

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Oliver Twist has asked for more!' Fleeing the workhouse, Oliver finds himself taken under the wing of the Artful Dodger and caught up with a group of pickpockets in London. As he tries to free himself from their clutches he becomes immersed in the seedy underbelly of the Capital, amongst criminals, prostitutes and the homeless. Dickens scathing attack on the cruelness of Victorian Society features some of his most memorable and enduring characters, including innocent Oliver himself, the Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy.

Read more less

'This is no dusty relic, but instead something sparkling and modern' Armando IannucciIn a wildly eventful life, David Copperfield moves from the cruelty of his stepfather's care to the heights of success as a beloved and respected novelist. On his journey through Victorian society, he endures bitter treatment as a labourer, wins the approval of his formidable aunt, finds himself an education - and a career, falls in love, and expands his circle of acquaintance to include true, false and marvellously eccentric friends. Dickens's own favourite among his novels, The Personal History of David Copperfield is a classic of comedy and tragedy that never ceases to surprise and delight.

Read more less

'One of Dickens's most neglected, but most rewarding, novels' Peter AckroydSet against the backdrop of the Gordon Riots of 1780, Barnaby Rudge is a story of mystery and suspense which begins with an unsolved double murder and goes on to involve conspiracy, blackmail, abduction and retribution. Through the course of the novel fathers and sons become opposed, apprentices plot against their masters and anti-Catholic mobs rampage through the streets. With its dramatic descriptions of public violence and private horror, its strange secrets and ghostly doublings, Barnaby Rudge is a powerful, disturbing blend of historical realism and Gothic melodrama.Edited with an Introduction and Notes by John Bowen

Read more less

A rich collection of primary materials, the multivolume Archives of Empire provides a documentary history of nineteenth-century British imperialism from the Indian subcontinent to the Suez Canal to southernmost Africa. Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter have carefully selected a diverse range of texts that track the debates over imperialism in the ranks of the military, the corridors of political power, the lobbies of missionary organizations, the halls of royal geographic and ethnographic societies, the boardrooms of trading companies, the editorial offices of major newspapers, and far-flung parts of the empire itself. Focusing on a particular region and historical period, each volume in Archives of Empire is organized into sections preceded by brief introductions. Documents including mercantile company charters, parliamentary records, explorers’ accounts, and political cartoons are complemented by timelines, maps, and bibligraphies. Unique resources for teachers and students, these books reveal the complexities of nineteenth-century colonialism and emphasize its enduring relevance to the “global markets” of the twenty-first century. Tracing the beginnings of the British colonial enterprise in South Asia and the Middle East, From the Company to the Canal brings together key texts from the era of the privately owned British East India Company through the crises that led to the company’s takeover by the Crown in 1858. It ends with the momentous opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Government proclamations, military reports, and newspaper articles are included here alongside pieces by Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Benjamin Disraeli, and many others. A number of documents chronicle arguments between mercantilists and free trade advocates over the competing interests of the nation and the East India Company. Others provide accounts of imperial crises—including the trial of Warren Hastings, the Indian Rebellion (Sepoy Mutiny), and the Arabi Uprising—that highlight the human, political, and economic costs of imperial domination and control.

Read more less

‘The image of little Oliver Twist victimised by poverty, almost seduced by the specious excitement of crime, and then offered the possibility of a lucrative career in authorship is always compelling’ GuardianOliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape. In Oliver Twist, Dickens graphically conjures up the capital's underworld, full of prostitutes, thieves and lost and homeless children, and gives a voice to the disadvantaged and abused.

Read more less

In 1943, there was an urgent need for Animal Farm. The Soviet Union had become Britain’s ally in the war against Nazi Germany, and criticism of Stalin’s brutal regime was either censored or discouraged. In any case, many intellectuals on the left still celebrated the Soviet Union, claiming that the terrors of its show trials, summary executions and secret police were either exaggerated or necessary. But, to Orwell, Stalin was always a “disgusting murderer” and he wanted to remind people of this fact in a powerful and memorable way. But how to do it? A political essay would never reach a wide enough audience; a traditional novel would take too long to write. Orwell hit on the inspired idea of combining the moralism of the traditional ‘beast fable’ with the satire of Gulliver’s Travels. A group of farmyard animals, led by the pigs, overthrow their human masters. Their revolution is inspired by high ideals: the farm will be run in the interests of its animals with no more slaughtering, plenty of food for all and comfort in retirement. But when Napoleon the pig takes command, he quickly corrupts their principles, creating a new tyranny worse than the old. Orwell wrote Animal Farm in the middle of the Second World War, but at first no publishers wanted to touch it. It was finally published in August 1945, once the war was over. This little book quickly became a seminal text in the emerging ‘cold war’ (a phrase that Orwell himself coined). It also became a site of that conflict itself, suffering various attempts to subvert or change its meaning. Today, Animal Farm remains a powerful fable about the nature of tyranny and corruption which applies for all ages. Our edition also includes the following essays: Shooting an Elephant; Charles Dickens; Inside the Whale; The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda; Literature and Totalitarianism; Fascism and Democracy; Patriots and Revolutionaries; Catastrophic Gradualism; Some Thoughts on the Common Toad; Why I Write; Writers and Leviathan

Read more less

One of Dickens's finest novels, Great Expectations chronicles the fortunes of its young protagonist Pip as he is unexpectedly endowed by a mysterious benefactor with the life of a gentleman, enabling him to escape to London from the prospect of a humble blacksmith's career in rural Kent. In the bustling, unforgiving capital he must learn for himself the pitfalls of love and wealth, and how to sort his friends from his enemies. Through the lives of its unforgettable and iconic characters - such as Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estella - Great Expectations charts the course of an England undergoing rapid social and economic change, and tells a tale that is among the foremost classics of the English language.

Read more less

The most popular of all ghost stories was first published on 17 December 1843, and by Christmas Eve 6, 000 copies had been sold at a published price of five shillings. The story of Scrooge, a miser who becomes a different man when he is presented with visions of past, present and future by Marley's ghost, was an immediate success and has remainded so ever since. It is a book to read on Christmas Eve beside a blazing fire - and the best introduction to Dickens for young readers not quite ready for his longer novels. Arthur Rackham, master of the fantastic, illustrated the story in 1915.

Read more less

England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious "blood libel" was first introduced when a resident accused the city’s Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England’s rejection of "the Jew" and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, she charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture. In a sweeping view that extends from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late seventeenth century, Lavezzo tracks how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews via buildings—tombs, latrines and especially houses—that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. Lavezzo reveals the central place of "the Jew" in the slow process by which a Christian "nation of shopkeepers" negotiated their relationship to the urban capitalist sensibility they came to embrace and embody. In the book’s epilogue, she advances her inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.

Read more less

'The power of Dickens is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive' WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAYThe story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers with its depiction of a dark criminal underworld 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, Oliver Twist 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.Edited with an Introduction and notes by PHILIP HORNE

Read more less

A gripping tale of violent jealousy, sexual passion and treachery, Honoré de Balzac's Cousin Bette is translated from the French with an introduction by Marion Ayton Crawford in Penguin Classics.Poor, plain spinster Bette is compelled to survive on the condescending patronage of her socially superior relatives in Paris: her beautiful, saintly cousin Adeline, the philandering Baron Hulot and their daughter Hortense. Already deeply resentful of their wealth, when Bette learns that the man she is in love with plans to marry Hortense, she becomes consumed by the desire to exact her revenge and dedicates herself to the destruction of the Hulot family, plotting their ruin with patient, silent malice. The culmination of the Comédie humaine, and a brilliant portrayal of the grasping, bourgeois society of 1840s Paris, Cousin Bette is one of Balzac's greatest triumphs as a novelist.Marion Ayton Crawford's lively translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the novel's portrayal of rapidly changing times, as the new, ambitious middle classes replaced France's old imperial ways.Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) failed at being a lawyer, publisher, printer, businessman, critic and politician before, at the age of thirty, turning his hand to writing. His life's work, La Comédie humaine, is a series of ninety novels and short stories which offer a magnificent panorama of nineteenth-century life after the French Revolution. Balzac was an influence on innumerable writers who followed him, including Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.If you enjoyed Cousin Bette, you might like Balzac's Old Goriot, also available in Penguin Classics.

Read more less

His elegantly-crafted tale of sibling rivalry, Honoré de Balzac's The Black Sheep is translated from the French with an introduction by Donald Adamson in Penguin Classics.Philippe and Joseph Bridau are two extremely different brothers. The elder, Philippe, is a superficially heroic soldier and adored by their mother Agathe. He is nonetheless a bitter figure, secretly gambling away her savings after a brief but glorious career as Napoleon's aide-de-camp at the battle of Montereau. His younger brother Joseph, meanwhile, is fundamentally virtuous - but their mother is blinded to his kindness by her disapproval of his life as an artist. Foolish and prejudiced, Agathe lives on unaware that she is being cynically manipulated by her own favourite child - but will she ever discover which of her sons is truly the black sheep of the family? A dazzling depiction of the power of money and the cruelty of life in nineteenth-century France, The Black Sheep compellingly explores is a compelling exploration of the nature of deceit.Donald Adamson's translation captures the radical modernity of Balzac's style, while his introduction places The Black Sheep in its context as one of the great novels of Balzac's renowned Comédie humaine.Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) failed at being a lawyer, publisher, printer, businessman, critic and politician before, at the age of thirty, turning his hand to writing. His life's work, La Comédie humaine, is a series of ninety novels and short stories which offer a magnificent panorama of nineteenth-century life after the French Revolution. Balzac was an influence on innumerable writers who followed him, including Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.If you enjoyed The Black Sheep, you might like Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, also available in Penguin Classics.

Read more less

It may not be the longest, deepest or widest river in the world but few bodies of water reveal as much about a nation's past and present, or are suggestive of its future, as England's River Thames. Tales of legendary lock-keepers and long-vanished weirs evoke the distant past of a river which evolved into a prime commercial artery linking the heart of England with the ports of Europe. In Victorian times, the Thames hosted regattas galore, its new bridges and tunnels were celebrated as marvels of their time, and London's river was transformed from sewer to centrepiece of the British Empire. Talk of the Thames Gateway and the effectiveness of the Thames Barrier keeps the river in the news today, while the lengthening Thames Path makes the waterway more accessible than ever before. Through quiet meadows, rolling hills, leafy suburbia, industrial sites and a changing London riverside, Mick Sinclair tracks the Thames from source to sea, documenting internationally-known landmarks such as Tower Bridge and Windsor Castle and revealing lesser known features such as Godstow Abbey, Canvey Island, the Sanford Lasher, and George Orwell's tranquil grave. Paintings, Words and Music: Turner, Tissot, Whistler and Monet; Shakespeare at Southwark, Alexander Pope, Charles Dickens, Jerome K. Jerome, William Morris; Handel's Water Music, the first rendition of Rule Britannia, the Rolling Stones and The Who rocking Eel Pie Island. Power, Politics and Intrigue: Runnymede and Magna Carta, the first English parliament, Whitehall Palace, Cliveden and the Profumo affair, the Houses of Parliament and the brooding headquarters of MI5 and MI6. Trade and Commerce: Eel trapping, osier growing; bargemen, watermen and lightermen; the rise and fall of London's docks; urban regeneration, rural protection.

Read more less

‘The word “mesmerising” is frequently applied to memoirs, but seldom as deservedly as in the case of Girl With Dove’ Financial Times ‘Reading is a form of escape and an avid reader is an escape artist…’ Brilliantly original, funny and clever Honor Clark, Spectator, Book of the Year Growing up in a dilapidated house by the sea where men were forbidden, Sally’s childhood world was filled with mystery and intrigue. Hippies trailed through the kitchen looking for God – their leader was Aunt Di, who ruled the house with charismatic force. When Sally’s baby brother vanishes from his pram, she becomes suspicious of the activities going on around her. What happened to Baby David and the woman called Poor Sue? And where did all the people singing and wailing prayers in the front room suddenly go? Disappearing into a world of books and reading, Sally adopts the tried and tested methods of Miss Marple. Taking books for hints and clues, she turns herself into a reading detective. Her discovery of Jane Eyre marks the beginning of a vivid journey through Victorian literature where she also finds the kind, eccentric figure of Charles Dickens’ Betsey Trotwood. These characters soon become her heroines, acting as a part of an alternative family, offering humour and guidance during many difficult moments in Sally’s life. Combining the voices of literary characters with those of her real-life counterparts, Girl With Dove reads as a magical series of strange encounters, climaxing with a comic performance of Shakespeare in the children’s home where Sally is eventually sent. Weaving literary classics with a young girl’s coming of age story, this is a book that testifies to the transformative power of reading and the literary imagination. Mixing fairy tale, literary classics, nursery rhymes and folklore, it is the story of a child’s adventure in wonderland and search for truth in an adult world often cast in deep shadow.

Read more less

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…' A Tale of Two Cities is arguably the greatest story of mistaken identity ever told, interweaving a heart-breaking family tragedy with the bloody French Revolution. Dr Manette is released from imprisonment in the Bastille and is reunited with his daughter, Lucie. Two men – an apathetic English lawyer and an exiled French aristocrat – vie for her love in a time of uncertainty, sacrifice and terror. Self-proclaimed by Dickens as ‘the best story I have ever written’, A Tale of Two Cities is an enduring epic of historical fiction.

Read more less

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. After reading Christmas Carol, the notoriously reculsive Thomas Carlyle was "seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality" and threw not one but two Christmas dinner parties. The impact of the story may not always have been so dramatic but, along with Dickens other Christmas writings, it has had a lasting and significant influence upon our ideas about the Christmas spirit, and about the season as a time for celebration, charity, and memory.

Read more less

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Please, sir, I want some more.' An orphan boy of seemingly no consequence goes on an adventure that will change his life forever. Fleeing a cruel workhouse, Oliver finds himself taken under the wing of the Artful Dodger and caught up with a group of pickpockets in London. Navigating the seedy underbelly of the capital, Oliver’s innocence is never corrupted as he struggles to find a loving family of his own. Dickens’ scathing attack on the harshness of Victorian poverty features some of his most memorable and enduring villains – the fiendish Fagin and monstrous Bill Sikes – and is a classic tale of good versus evil.

Read more less

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,' said the Spirit. 'Look upon me!' A celebration of Christmas, a tale of redemption and a critique on Victorian society, Dickens' atmospheric novella follows the miserly, penny-pinching Ebenezer Scrooge who views Christmas as 'humbug'. It is only through a series of eerie, life-changing visits from the ghost of his deceased business partner Marley and the spirits of Christmas past, present and future that he begins to see the error of his ways. With heart-rending characters, rich imagery and evocative language, the message of A Christmas Carol remains as significant today as when it was first published.

Read more less

In this well-illustrated text, Dr. Denney asserts that the artists who image Diana, Princess of Wales, have framed her according to a cultural memory based on traditions of royal portraiture and according to twentieth-century reassertions (that is, reframings) of the debate over feminism and femininity in visual culture. Art historians and literary critics have examined the visual culture of Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II, and more recently, images of women in the court of Charles II, but no one has addressed, as the author does here, the impact of imaging Diana, Princess of Wales, at a time in British culture when feminism and femininity collide. Dr. Denney critiques art historical traditions of portraiture in order to argue that a princess must perform a constructed role of femininity, one that corresponds to Victorian codes of royal protocol, visual practice, and behavior. The book encompasses themes of marriage, motherhood, philanthropy, royal dress, and autobiography. Through an examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings, photographs, engravings, and popular illustrations, the study engages a comparative visual dialogue on the imaging of royal women. Looking particularly at the nineteenth-century Princess of Wales, Alexandra (born Princess Alexandra of Denmark), the author reveals the persistence of a cultural memory in terms of the proper roles and behaviors of a princess from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. By looking at portraits of Diana, Princess of Wales, in conjunction with past royal portraits, the study determines that she, like Princess Alexandra before her, is conscious of tradition and employs it as a matter of survival. The book's methods in this regard include an exploration of royal portrait traditions, gender studies, popular journalism, theories on feminist biography and autobiography, as well as costume theory and history to contextualize the representation of Diana, Princess of Wales. How does one address the insistence on

Read more less

'Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else'Dickens's novel honouring the value of the human heart in an age of materialism centres on Coketown, where Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of Utilitarian success, feeds his pupils and his family with facts, banning fancy and wonder from young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa becomes trapped in a loveless marriage, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in crime. As their fortunes cross with those of a free-spirited circus girl and a victimized weaver, Gradgrind is forced to question everything he believes in.Edited with an Introduction and notes by KATE FLINT

Read more less

'His characters are marvellous, his insights wonderful ... You don't expect reality but you get something bigger and better' Ruth RendellThe Old Curiosity Shop was an instant bestseller that, even while it was criticized for its sentimentality, captured the hearts of the nation with its portrayal of little Nell Trent, who is thrown into a terrifying world when her beloved grandfather is unable to pay his debts to the loathsome Quilp. Alongside the pathos of the innocent, tragic Nell are some of Dickens's greatest characters: the ne'er-do'well Dick Swiveller, the mannish lawyer Sally Brass, the half-starved 'Marchioness' and the lustful Quilp himself, a creation of demonic power and cruelty. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Norman Page

Read more less

The most beautiful Victorian maps of England's counties and cities – in large format – by one of Britain's great cartographer's Thomas Moule. Thomas Moule was one of the finest Victorian mapmakers and is regarded as the true follower of John Speed in the cartographic history of Britain. Moule’s beautifully observed county and city maps present a minutely detailed record of 19th-century England. They were first published in collectable parts between 1830 and 1837 and then published together in the extensive 2-volume masterwork The English Counties Delineated. Moule celebrated the ‘ancientness’ and history of each county by including pastoral or monument views within the maps, all framed by cartouches, festoons and architectural ornament in a variety of historical styles. But underpinning this ancient vision is the hand of the British Industrial Revolution. Moule’s maps are deeply informed by the early technical work of the Ordnance Survey and record the unstoppable growth of the major cities and the unrelenting spread of the railways. The maps have remained influential and highly collectable as both originals and as reproductions. For the first time in a generation this new large-format volume, comprising 55 county and city maps, presents the main body of Thomas Moule’s work alongside his original detailed text descriptions. The book’s Introduction explains Moule’s career as a writer and antiquary and sets his celebrated maps in the context of the technical cartographic revolution in which they were published. The book examines the wide-ranging artistic and cultural influences exhibited as Moule combines accurate cartography with highly decorative architectural frames and evocative, Romantic, pastoral views of the England he so cherished. In doing so it positions him alongside his fellow celebrated Victorian pioneers, including George Virtue, William Westall, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, JMW Turner, Augustus Pugin, Edward Stanford and George Bradshaw.

Read more less

The relentless pace of urbanization since the industrial revolution has inspired a continuing effort to view, read, and name the modern city. "We are now at a point of transition to a new kind of city", write William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, "and thus we are experiencing the same crisis of language felt by observers of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities." "Visions of the Modern City" explores the ways in which artists and writers have struggled to define the city during the past two centuries and opens a new perspective on the urban vision of our time. In their introduction, the editors outline three phases in the evolution of the modern city-- each having its own distinctive morphology and metaphor-- and argue that a new vocabulary is needed to describe the sprawling "urban field" of today. Eric Lampard draws a detailed demographic and geographic picture of urbanization since the late eighteenth century, culminating with the "decentered" city of the 1980s. Other contributors examine the representation of cities from the London and Paris of 1850 to the New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo of the present. Deborah Nord and Philip Collins follow Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens, respectively, through the urban underworld of Victorian London. Theodore Reff traces the double life of Paris expressed in the work of Manet, while Michele Hannoosh shows bow Baudelaire influenced the Impressionists by transferring the aesthetic implications of the term nature to urban experience. Thomas Bender and William Taylor focus on tensions between the horizontal and the vertical in the architectural development of New York City, and Paul Anderer investigates the private, domestic spaces that represent Tokyo in postwar Japanese fiction. Steven Marcus analyzes the breakdown of the city as signifying system in the novels of Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon, writers who question whether the indecipherable contemporary city has any meaning left at all.

Read more less

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule' Pip is an orphan without any expectations – he has no name, no fortune and no prospects. It is only when he begins to visit Miss Havisham, elderly, rich and reclusive, and her adopted niece Estella, that he begins to hope for something better. And when it is revealed that Pip has inherited a large sum of money from a mysterious benefactor, he begins an adventure that will change his life forever. Epic and memorable, Pip's quest to find the truth about himself is a classic coming-of-age tale and one of Dickens’ most enduring and popular novels.

Read more less

Samuel Rogers was arguably the most widely read poet of the early nineteenth century. He was also a prominent figure in the literary and cultural life of London and owned one of the largest private art collections of his day. He was well known to at least three generations of celebrated figures, ranging from John Wilkes and Dr. Burney, through Wordsworth, Scott and Byron, to Tennyson, Dickens and Ruskin. He was also associated with other prominent national figures such as Charles James Fox, Joseph Priestley, Lord Holland, and the Duke of Wellington. Known throughout his life (not always sympathetically) as the Banker Poet', he came from a radical, Dissenting background. He was supportive of the French Revolution and politically active in the 1790s when to be so involved personal danger (he attended the treason trials of Tom Paine and Horne Tooke). Nevertheless he considered his true vocation to be poetry and achieved considerable success and fame when The Pleasures of Memory was published in 1792. Ten years later he retired' to a civilised home in St. James's Place where his breakfast and dinner parties were legendary. His art collection attracted visitors from all over the world, and his poem Italy, composed after an extended tour there in 1815, was widely read. Martin Blocksidge considers the nature of Rogers' poetry and the reputation it acquired, and examines its cultural context; likewise Rogers' connoisseurship of paintings. Rogers was famous, but controversial, provoking some distaste and consequent satirical treatment, most notably from his erstwhile friend, Byron. Biographical and interdisciplinary, this narrative is relevant not only to literary historians but to those interested in the history of Dissenting and radical groups, picturesque travel, art history and the cultural history of London.

Read more less

Considered by many readers, including Shaw, Chesterton, Conrad and Trilling, as one of Dickens's finest achievements, Bleak House tells the complex story of a notorious lawsuit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of nineteenth-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the pervasive corruption of the legal system and the society which supports it. Displaying the writer's familiar panoramic sweep and enormous cast of brilliant characters, the novel is also a bold experimental narrative in which public and private worlds are brought into sharp focus. It was first published in monthly parts, 1852-3, accompanied by the illustrations by 'Phiz' reproduced in this volume. This edition also reprints the original Everyman preface by G. K. Chesterton.

Read more less

'It is proof of Dickens' genius (or maybe just the unchanging nature of Britain) that you can read Hard Times as if it were all happening now' Guardian 'Facts alone are wanted in life' The children at Mr Gradgrind's school are sternly ordered to stifle their imaginations and pay attention only to cold, hard reality. They live in a smoky, troubled industrial town so entertainment is hard to come by and resentments run deep. The effects of Gradgrind's teaching on his own children, Tom and Louisa, are particularly profound and leave them ill-equipped to deal with the unpredictable desires of the human heart. Luckily for them they have a friend in Sissy Jupe, the child of a circus clown, who retains her warm-hearted, compassionate nature despite the pressures around her.

Read more less

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.' Living with his sister and her husband, Pip is an orphan without any expectations. It is only when he begins to visit a rich old woman, Miss Havisham and her adopted niece that he begins to hope for something better. When it is revealed that Pip has inherited a large sum of money from a mysterious benefactor on the condition that he moves to London to become a gentleman, Pip's adventure really begins. Epic, illuminating and memorable, Dickens mysterious tale of Pip's quest to find the truth about himself is one of his most enduring and popular novels to date.

Read more less

An innovative novel featuring an astonishingly wicked female villain, Wilkie Collins's Armadale was regarded by T.S. Eliot as 'the best of [his] romances'. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by John Sutherland.When the elderly Allan Armadale makes a terrible confession on his death-bed, he has little idea of the repercussions to come, for the secret he reveals involves the mysterious Lydia Gwilt: flame-haired temptress, bigamist, laudanum addict and husband-poisoner. Her malicious intrigues fuel the plot of this gripping melodrama: a tale of confused identities, inherited curses, romantic rivalries, espionage, money - and murder. The character of Lydia Gwilt horrified contemporary critics, with one reviewer describing her as 'One of the most hardened female villains whose devices and desires have ever blackened fiction'. She remains among the most enigmatic and fascinating women in nineteenth-century literature and the dark heart of this most sensational of Victorian 'sensation novels'.John Sutherland's introduction illustrated how Wilkie Collins drew on scandalous newspaper headlines and on new technology particularly the penny post and the telegraph - to lend extra pace and veracity to his tale. This edition also contains notes, further reading and an appendix on stage dramatisations of Armadale.Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was born in London in 1824, the eldest son of the landscape painter William Collins. In 1846 he was entered to read for the bar at Lincoln's Inn, where he gained the knowledge that was to give him much of the material for his writing. From the early 1850s he was a friend of Charles Dickens, who produced and acted in two melodramas written by Collins, The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep. Of his novels, Collins is best remembered for The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868).If you enjoyed Armadale, you might like Collins's No Name, also available in Penguin Classics.

Read more less

Americans have come to expect that the nation’s presidential campaigns will be characterized by a carnival atmosphere emphasizing style over substance. But this fascinating account of the pivotal 1840 election reveals how the now-unavoidable traditions of big money, big rallies, shameless self-promotion, and carefully manufactured candidate images first took root in presidential politics.Pulitzer Prize–nominated former Wall Street Journal reporter Ronald G. Shafer tells the colorful story of the election battle between sitting president Martin Van Buren, a professional Democratic politician from New York, and Whig Party upstart William Henry Harrison, a military hero who was nicknamed “Old Tippecanoe” after a battlefield where he fought and won in 1811. Shafer shows how the pivotal campaign of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” marked a series of firsts that changed presidential politicking forever: the first presidential campaign as mass entertainment, directed at middle- and lower-income voters; the first “image campaign,” in which strategists painted Harrison as an everyman living in a log cabin sipping hard cider (in fact, he was born into wealth, lived in a twenty-two-room mansion, and drank only sweet cider); the first campaign in which a candidate, Harrison, traveled and delivered speeches directly to voters; the first one influenced by major campaign donations; the first in which women openly participated; and the first involving massive grassroots rallies, attended by tens of thousands and marked by elaborate fanfare, including bands, floats, a log cabin on wheels, and the world’s tallest man.Some of history’s most fascinating figures—including Susan B. Anthony, Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Thaddeus Stevens, and Walt Whitman—pass through this colorful story, which is essential reading for anyone interested in learning when image first came to trump ideas in presidential politics.

Read more less

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…' Set in Paris and London against the backdrop of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities tells the story of Lucie Manette and her father Alexandre, held captive in Paris’s notorious Bastille prison for eighteen years. When Alexandre is finally released, the Manettes find themselves caught up in the lives of a French aristocrat and an English lawyer who compete for the love of Lucie. The ensuing tale of violence and revenge depicts the plight of the peasantry, the brutality of the early revolutionaries, and the menacing shadow of the guillotine. Serialised in Dickens’s own literary periodical in 1859, A Tale of Two Cities is one of the best-known works of literature set during the French Revolution.

Read more less

The Moonstone is one of the first true works of detective fiction, in which Wilkie Collins established the groundwork for the genre itself. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction by Sandra Kemp.The Moonstone, a priceless yellow diamond, is looted from an Indian temple and maliciously bequeathed to Rachel Verinder. On her eighteenth birthday, her friend and suitor Franklin Blake brings the gift to her. That very night, it is stolen again. No one is above suspicion, as the idiosyncratic Sergeant Cuff and the Franklin piece together a puzzling series of events as mystifying as an opium dream and as deceptive as the nearby Shivering Sand. The intricate plot and modern technique of multiple narrators made Wilkie Collins's 1868 work a huge success in the Victorian sensation genre. With a reconstruction of the crime, red herrings and a 'locked-room' puzzle, The Moonstone was also a major precursor of the modern mystery novel.In her introduction Sandra Kemp explores The Moonstone's the detective elements of Collins's writing, and reveals how Collins's sensibilities were untypical of his era.Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was born in London in 1824, the eldest son of the landscape painter William Collins. In 1846 he was entered to read for the bar at Lincoln's Inn, where he gained the knowledge that was to give him much of the material for his writing. From the early 1850s he was a friend of Charles Dickens, who produced and acted in two melodramas written by Collins, The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep. Of his novels, Collins is best remembered for The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868).If you enjoyed The Moonstone you might like Collins's The Woman in White, also available in Penguin Classics.'Probably the very finest detective story ever written'Dorothy L. Sayers'The first, the longest and the best of modern modern English detective novels'T.S. Eliot

Read more less

A rich collection of primary materials, the multivolume Archives of Empire provides a documentary history of nineteenth-century British imperialism from the Indian subcontinent to the Suez Canal to southernmost Africa. Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter have carefully selected a diverse range of texts that track the debates over imperialism in the ranks of the military, the corridors of political power, the lobbies of missionary organizations, the halls of royal geographic and ethnographic societies, the boardrooms of trading companies, the editorial offices of major newspapers, and far-flung parts of the empire itself. Focusing on a particular region and historical period, each volume in Archives of Empire is organized into sections preceded by brief introductions. Documents including mercantile company charters, parliamentary records, explorers’ accounts, and political cartoons are complemented by timelines, maps, and bibligraphies. Unique resources for teachers and students, these books reveal the complexities of nineteenth-century colonialism and emphasize its enduring relevance to the “global markets” of the twenty-first century. Tracing the beginnings of the British colonial enterprise in South Asia and the Middle East, From the Company to the Canal brings together key texts from the era of the privately owned British East India Company through the crises that led to the company’s takeover by the Crown in 1858. It ends with the momentous opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Government proclamations, military reports, and newspaper articles are included here alongside pieces by Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Benjamin Disraeli, and many others. A number of documents chronicle arguments between mercantilists and free trade advocates over the competing interests of the nation and the East India Company. Others provide accounts of imperial crises—including the trial of Warren Hastings, the Indian Rebellion (Sepoy Mutiny), and the Arabi Uprising—that highlight the human, political, and economic costs of imperial domination and control.

Read more less

An acclaimed dramatisation of Dickens' well-loved Christmas story - more faithful to the original than any other published version, and making skilful use of traditional carols to underscore the action. Karen Louise Hebden's stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol was first staged at Derby Playhouse in 2003, directed by Stephen Edwards with Ben Roberts as Scrooge, breaking box office records with 98% paid attendance. Hebden's version was staged at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in December 2005, and was revived at Derby Playhouse in 2006. It has subsequently enjoyed over fifty amateur productions nationally as well as being the inaugural Christmas production at The Rose, Kingston, in December 2008.

Read more less

“The Nate series by Tim Federle is a wonderful evocation of what it’s like to be a theater kid. Highly recommended.” —Lin-Manuel Miranda, star and creator of the musical, Hamilton “An exceptional swan song for a beloved character.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Third time’s a charm! Nate Foster returns home to Jankburg, Pennsylvania, to face his biggest challenge yet—high school—in this final novel in the Lambda Literary Award–winning Nate trilogy, which The New York Times calls “inspired and inspiring.”When the news hits that E.T.: The Musical wasn’t nominated for a single Tony Award—not one!—the show closes, leaving Nate both out of luck and out of a job. And while Nate’s cast mates are eager to move on (the boy he understudies already landed a role on a TV show!), Nate knows it’s back to square one, also known as Jankburg, Pennsylvania. Where horror (read: high school) awaits. Desperate to turn his life from flop to fabulous, Nate takes on a huge freshman English project with his BFF, Libby: he’s going to make a musical out of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. (What could possibly go…right?) But when Nate’s New York crush ghosts him, and his grades start to slip, he finds the only thing harder than being on Broadway is being a freshman — especially when you’ve got a secret you’re desperate to sing out about. This magical conclusion to Tim Federle’s beloved Nate series is a love letter to theater kids young and not-so-young—and for anyone who ever wondered if they could truly go home again. Especially when doing so means facing everything you thought you’d left behind.

Read more less