New Releases by Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it ranks among the most famous works in the history of fictional literature. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events. The most notable are Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. Darnay is a French once-aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Carton is a dissipated English barrister who endeavours to redeem his ill-spent life out of his unrequited love for Darnay''s wife. The 45-chapter novel was published in 31 weekly instalments in Dickens'' new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. From April 1859 to November 1859, Dickens also republished the chapters as eight monthly sections in green covers. All but three of Dickens'' previous novels had appeared only as monthly instalments. The first weekly instalment of A Tale of Two Cities ran in the first issue of All the Year Round on 30 April 1859. The last ran thirty weeks later, on 26 November.

In the early days of the French Revolution, a young Englishman determines to do his utmost to save the husband of the woman he loves from the guillotine.

Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens’s story of a powerful man whose callous neglect of his family triggers his professional and personal downfall, showcases the author’s gift for vivid characterization and unfailingly realistic description. As Jonathan Lethem contends in his Introduction, Dickens’s “genius . . . is at one with the genius of the form of the novel itself: Dickens willed into existence the most capacious and elastic and versatile kind of novel that could be, one big enough for his vast sentimental yearnings and for every impulse and fear and hesitation in him that countervailed those yearnings too. Never parsimonious and frequently contradictory, he always gives us everything he can, everything he’s planned to give, and then more.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic was set from the 1867 “Charles Dickens” edition.

Young John Harmon is supposedly killed on a journey back to England. Very much alive, this heir to a dust merchant''s fortune goes to work under an assumed name for his father''s current heirs.

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.

This volume collects for the first time all of Charles Dickens'' extant plans and notes for his novels. Dickens wrote his novels in segments during the course of serial publication. Beginning with Dombey and Son, the sixth novel, he wrote out plans for each segment as he went along, sketching future developments, querying himself about options, noting motifs, establishing recurrent images, working out chronologies, experimenting with names, and, in general, reminding himself of what he had done and what he should do next. Some notes survive from before Dombey and those for a few novels after that are incomplete or abbreviated, but for the most part the plan from Dombey on are full and complete. Each sheet of these notes is reproduced here in actual-size photographic facsimile and is transcribed on the facing page in typographic facsimile, a format that preserves Dickens'' holographic nuances and at the same time allows for the instant decipherment of his often difficult hand. Included are his plans for The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and Edwin Drood. The volume also contains thirty-three full-page illustrations and a full-color frontispiece. Harry Stone, an internationally recognized Dickens scholar, provides the reader with a full account of Dickens'' methods of planning and working. In a comprehensive introduction and extensive notes, he uses Dickens'' written plans to illuminate the thought and technique of the novels. He examines creative concerns, such as Dickens'' process of naming and visualization, and technical matters, such as his use of various pen nibs, ink colors, and papers. By making fully available and comprehensible Dickens'' own cache of in-process plans, possibilities, and alternatives for shaping his novels, Dickens'' Working Notes offers unparalleled insights into the novelist''s art and into the nature of the creative imagination.

Recounts the travels and comic experiences of Samuel Pickwick, his friends, and the members of his club

A young, compassionate man struggles to save his family and friends from the abusive exploitation of his cold-hearted, grasping uncle.

The French classic in which a group of guards to the king engage in adventure and mishap protecting the throne.