Charles Dickens
1) Hard times
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.3 - AR Pts: 20
Lexile measure
790L
Language
English
Description
"Written deliberately to increase the circulation of Dickens's weekly magazine, Household Words, Hard Times was a huge and instantaneous success upon publication in 1854. Yet this novel is not the cheerful celebration of Victorian life one might have expected from the beloved author of The Pickwick Papers and The Old Curiosity Shop. Compressed, stark, allegorical, it is a bitter exposé of capitalist exploitation during the industrial revolution-and...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.8 - AR Pts: 61
Lexile measure
1090L
Language
English
Description
Charles Dickens's last completed novel, "Our Mutual Friend" is the story of "Noddy" Boffin, a common clerk who becomes "the Golden Dustman" after he inherits a dust-heap where the aristocracy throw their refuge. A brutal satire and social analysis, "Our Mutual Friend" is a masterpiece that explores the allure and curse of money while demonstrating all the themes the author is famous for. Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was an English writer...
Author
Series
Lexile measure
1180L
Language
English
Description
Of the complex, richly rewarding masterworks he wrote in the last decade of his life, Little Dorrit is the book in which Charles Dickens most fully unleashed his indignation at the fallen state of mid-Victorian society. Crammed with persons and incidents in whose recreation nothing is accidental or spurious, containing, in its picture of the Circumlocution Office, the most witheringly exact satire of a bureaucracy we possess, Little Dorrit is a stunning...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 11.8 - AR Pts: 60
Lexile measure
1210L
Language
English
Description
Four bumbling members of a nineteenth-century London social club, known as the legendary Pickwick Club, journey to places outside the city and become involved in romantic foibles, danger, and a few legal scrapes.
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.8 - AR Pts: 67
Lexile measure
1180L
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Series
Lexile measure
820L
Language
English
Description
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";...