New Releases by Charles Dickens

"Christmas Classics: Charles Dickens Collection (With Original Illustrations)" is a quintessential anthology that showcases Dickens''s masterful narrative style, interweaving vivid characterizations with profound social commentary. Featuring beloved tales such as "A Christmas Carol," "The Chimes," and "The Cricket on the Hearth," this collection not only captures the spirit of Christmas but also reflects the Victorian societal values, dilemmas, and hopes of its time. The original illustrations accompany each story, enriching the text and offering readers a visual glimpse into the era, thus framing Dickens''s work within the larger Victorian literary context where morality and social responsibility play pivotal roles. Charles Dickens, one of the most celebrated novelists of the 19th century, was deeply influenced by his own hardships and the socio-economic conditions of Victorian England. Having experienced poverty in his youth, Dickens became a fervent advocate for social reform and used his literary voice to shine a light on the plight of the working class. His personal experiences, coupled with his keen observations of societal injustices, led him to write these holiday classics that echo themes of redemption, generosity, and community. Recommended for both long-time Dickens enthusiasts and new readers alike, this collection provides a unique opportunity to experience the warmth of Dickens''s stories as intended by the author. With its timeless messages and charming original illustrations, "Christmas Classics" invites readers to reflect on the true spirit of the season and encourages a sense of compassion that transcends time. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works'' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work''s strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author''s overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection''s central themes.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a historical novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie, whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.

"My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else," proclaimed Charles Dickens in explaining the theme of this classic novel. Published in 1854, the story concerns one Thomas Gradgrind, a "fanatic of the demonstrable fact," who raises his children, Tom and Louisa, in a stifling and arid atmosphere of grim practicality.Without a moral compass to guide them, the children sink into lives of desperation and despair, played out against the grim background of Coketown, a wretched community shadowed by an industrial behemoth. Louisa falls into a loveless marriage with Josiah Bouderby, a vulgar banker, while the unscrupulous Tom, totally lacking in principle, becomes a thief who frames an innocent man for his crime. Witnessing the degradation and downfall of his children, Gradgrind realizes that his own misguided principles have ruined their lives.Considered Dickens'' harshest indictment of mid-19th-century industrial practices and their dehumanizing effects, this novel offers a fascinating tapestry of Victorian life, filled with the richness of detail, brilliant characterization, and passionate social concern that typify the novelist''s finest creations.Of Dickens'' work, the eminent Victorian critic John Ruskin had this to say: "He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially Hard Times, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions."

This superb collection of classic Victorian literature features the most notable works of Charles Dickens, including Oliver Twist (1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861). Considered the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, Dickens was especially known for his unusual characters, incisive social commentary, and carefully constructed plots. Over the last two centuries, his popular fiction has continued to inspire adaptations in nearly artistic genre, and now it is available--complete and unabridged--in this gorgeous slipcase edition. The stylish clothbound hardcover also features a ribbon marker, historical timeline, and comprehensive introduction, enlightening the reader on the author’s life and works.

My health required a temporary residence in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, and who had happened to drive past the house, had written to me to suggest it as a likely place. I had got into the train at midnight, and had fallen asleep, and had woke up and had sat looking out of window at the brilliant Northern Lights in the sky, and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to find the night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that I hadn''t been to sleep at all;—upon which question, in the first imbecility of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would have done wager by battle with the man who sat opposite me. That opposite man had had, through the night—as that opposite man always has—several legs too many, and all of them too long. In addition to this unreasonable conduct (which was only to be expected of him), he had had a pencil and a pocket-book, and had been perpetually listening and taking notes. It had appeared to me that these aggravating notes related to the jolts and bumps of the carriage, and I should have resigned myself to his taking them, under a general supposition that he was in the civil-engineering way of life, if he had not sat staring straight over my head whenever he listened. He was a goggle-eyed gentleman of a perplexed aspect, and his demeanour became unbearable.

A compendium of four of Charles Dickens''s Christmas stories, A Charles Dickens Christmas includes The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846) and The Haunted Man (1848).

"I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together." "In the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, wherein these presents bear date, two idle apprentices, exhausted by the long, hot summer and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran away from their employer." Thus starts The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1857) written in collaboration between the two renowned Victorian novelists Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Before the book took the form of a novella, it was serialized in Dickens''s periodical Household Words. It tells the story of two idle young men who are actually nothing but caricatures of the two authors themselves. They both go on a trip to Cumberland in North West England and start speaking about their adventures there. While the fictional Thomas Idle stands for Collins, Francis Goodchild stands for Dickens. For Francis, idleness is to spend one''s time without doing anything of significant importance while Thomas decides, after a number of misadventures, that activity is the root of all evil and that the only way to remain safe is to do absolutely nothing. Generally, the book is the authors'' very enjoyable satire of themselves and of each other although it also includes some reflections on social issues such as poverty and class differences.

The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters—the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness"; the mannish lawyer Sally Brass; Quilp's brow-beaten mother-in-law; and Quilp himself, the lustful, vengeful dwarf, whose demonic energy makes a vivid counterpoint to Nell's purity.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of British novelist CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870) not only to literature in the English language, but to Western civilization on the whole. He is arguably the first fiction writer to have become an international celebrity. He popularized episodic fiction and the cliffhanger, which had a profound influence on the development of film and television. He is entirely responsible for the popular image of Victorian London that still lingers today, and his characters-from Oliver Twist to Ebenezer Scrooge, from Miss Havisham to Uriah Heep-have become not merely iconic, but mythic. But it was his stirring portraits of ordinary people-not the upper classes or the aristocracy-and his fervent cries for social, moral, and legal justice for the working poor, and in particular for poor children, in the grim early decades of the Industrial Revolution that powerfully impacted social concerns well into the 20th century. Without Charles Dickens, we may never have seen the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Upton Sinclair, or even Bob Dylan. Here, in 30 beautiful volumes-complete with all the original illustrations-is every published word written by one of the most important writers ever. The essential collector''s set will delight anyone who cherishes English literature...and who takes pleasure in constantly rediscovering its joys. This volume contains Pictures from Italy-an 1846 travelogue featuring delightful observations on the street life of the great cities of that land-and American Notes, a journal of Dickens''s 1842 visit to the United States and Canada, the trip that provided the inspiration for his novel Martin Chuzzlewit.

Christmas Festivities Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton Christmas Episode from Master Humphrey's Clock Christmas Carol Haunted Man Christmas Tree What Christmas Means as we Grow Older Seven Poor Travellers

A Tale of Two Cities is a historical novel published in 1859 by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris, and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. In the Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction, critic Don D'Ammassa argues that it is an adventure novel because the protagonists are in constant danger of being imprisoned or killed. As Dickens's best-known work of historical fiction, A Tale of Two Cities is said to be one of the best-selling novels of all time. In 2003, the novel was ranked 63rd on the BBC's The Big Read poll. The novel has been adapted for film, television, radio, and the stage, and has continued to influence popular culture.

Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. It was originally published as a serial from 1837 to 1839, and as a three-volume book in 1838. The story follows the titular orphan, who, after being raised in a workhouse, escapes to London, where he meets a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin, discovers the secrets of his parentage, and reconnects with his remaining family. Oliver Twist unromantically portrays the sordid lives of criminals, and exposes the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century.[2] The alternative title, The Parish Boy's Progress, alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, as well as the 18th-century caricature series by painter William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress and A Harlot's Progress. In an early example of the social novel, Dickens satirises child labour, domestic violence, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of working as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens's own experiences as a youth contributed as well, considering he spent two years of his life in the workhouse at the age of 12 and subsequently, missed out on some of his education.

Christmas Festivities Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton Christmas Episode from Master Humphrey's Clock Christmas Carol Haunted Man Christmas Tree What Christmas Means as we Grow Older Seven Poor Travellers

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.