Charles Dickens

The story of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by a series of ghostly visitors. On Christmas Eve Scrooge sits in his counting-house with not a kind word for a soul, just wanting to be left alone until the 'humbug' of Christmas is over. Four ghostly visitors (his partner Marley, followed by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come) show him the error of his ways. By the time Christmas...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

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";...