Charles Dickens

With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Preston, University of Nottingham. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) and George Cruickshank. The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), with its combination of the sentimental, the grotesque and the socially concerned, and its story of pursuit and courage, which sets the downtrodden and the plucky against the malevolent and the villainous, was an immediate popular success. Little Nell quickly became one of Dickens' most celebrated characters, who so captured the imagination of his readers that while the novel was being serialised, many of them wrote to him about her fate. Dickens was conscious of the ‘many friends’ the novel had won for him, and ‘the many hearts it turned to me when they were full of private sorrow’, and it remains one of the most familiar and well-loved of his works.

At the center of Martin Chuzzlewit--the novel Angus Wilson called "one of the most sheerly exciting of all Dickens stories"--is Martin himself, very old, very rich, very much on his guard. What he suspects (with good reason) is that every one of Iris close and distant relations, now converging in droves on the country inn where they believe he is dying, will stop at nothing to become the inheritor of his great fortune. The distinctive combination of manic comedy, bitter satire and fierce melodrama separates this novel from its author's other works. Published in 1844 after Dickens returned from America, the action moves between Britain and United States in ways which highlight the failing of both societies.

Introduction and Notes by Dinny Thorold, University of Westminster. Illustrated by F. Walker and Maurice Greiffenhagen. 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. However human joy is not excluded thanks to 'Mr Sleary's Horse-Riding' circus, a gin-soaked and hilarious troupe of open-hearted and affectionate people who act as an antidote to all the drudgery and misery endured by the ordinary citizens of Coketown. Macaulay attacked Hard Times for its ‘sullen socialism’, but 20th-century critics such as George Bernard Shaw and F.R. Leavis have praised this book in the highest terms, while readers the world over have found inspiration and enjoyment from what is both Dickens’ shortest completed novel and also one of his important statements on Victorian society.

The distinctive combination of manic comedy, bitter satire and fierce melodrama separates this novel from its author's other works. Published in 1844 after Dickens returned from America, the action moves between Britain and United States in ways which highligh the failing of both societies. The Everyman edition is being published to tie in with a major BBC TV serialization in the autumn.

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.

It is said that all England mourned the heartbreaking fate of little Paul Dombey, but it is the ordeal of his loving and long-suffering sister, Florence, that carries the full emotional weight of the story. Their father's cold obsession with the future of his business empire, the malevolent plotting of his greedy manager, Mr. Carker, and the tragic self-contempt of his proud second wife, Edith, cast a dark shadow over the life of the motherless girl. But as the world of Dombey and Son begins to fall to pieces, Florence is sustained by the warmth and brightness of humbler allies: her fiercely loyal nurse, Susan Nipper; her haplessly devoted suitor, Toots; the rough but loveable old salt Captain Cuttle and his friend Sol Gills; and her fervent admirer, the orphan Walter Gay. In its locomotive power and its transcendent moments of suspense and revelation, Dombey and Son is a superb example of Dickens's ability to combine the qualities of a social historian, a theatrical artist, and a poet of the utmost tenderness and insight. Charles Dickens set this tale of a hard-hearted businessman, the son he pins all his hopes on, and the daughter he cruelly neglects in a country undergoing the storms of change brought by the Industrial Revolution. This edition reprints the original Everyman's introduction by G.K. Chesterton and includes forty illustrations by Phiz.

One of Dicken's great middle period novels, in which fairy tale, melodrama and realism mingle with halluncinatory power, DOMBEY AND SON weaves together a number of stories which centre upon the family of the self-important merchant, Paul Dombey, and his children Paul and Florence.

This is a bright, colourful adaptation of Dickens' popular Christmas story for reading aloud and performing. Scrooge's misery, the deadening chill as he meets the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, the merriment in Bob Cratchit's home and Scrooge's final, joyful celebration are all brought vividly to life. About the series Heinemann Plays is a well established series offering the best of contemporary drama and a wide range of established classics, in value-for-money hardback versions. The series has been specially developed to support classroom teaching and performance. Within the series there are plays for the full 11-17 age range. The series also contains the best of contemporary writing, and new editions of classic plays. Heinemann Plays are sewn and bound in sturdy hardback covers, guaranteeing longer life. Heinemann Plays are ideal for class reading and performance, many with large casts and an equal mix of parts for boys and girls.

The Pickwick Papers was Charles Dickens first novel, and became a comic masterpiece that catapulted its twenty-four-year-old author to immediate fame.Readers were captivated by the adventures of the poet Snodgrass, the lover Tupman, the sportsman Winkle &, above all, by that quintessentially English Quixote, Mr. Pickwick, & his cockney Sancho Panza, Sam Weller. From the hallowed turf of Dingley Dell Cricket Club to the unholy fracas of the Eatanswill election, via the Fleet debtor's prison, characters & incidents sprang to life from Dickens's pen, to form an enduringly popular work of ebullient humour & literary invention.

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr John Bowen, Department of English, University of Keele. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz). Martin Chuzzlewit is Charles Dickens' comic masterpiece about which his biographer, Forster, noted that it marked a crucial phase in the author's development as he began to delve deeper into the 'springs of character'. Old Martin Chuzzlewit, tormented by the greed and selfishness of his family, effectively drives his grandson, young Martin, to undertake a voyage to America. It is a voyage which will have crucial consequences not only for young Martin, but also for his grandfather and his grandfather's servant, Mary Graham with whom young Martin is in love. The commercial swindle of the Anglo-Bengalee company and the fraudulent Eden Land Corporation have a topicality in our own time. This strong sub-plot shows evidence of Dickens' mastery of crime where characters such as the criminal Jonas Chuzzlewit, the old nurse Mrs Gamp, and the arch-hypocrite Seth Pecksniff are the equal to any in his other great novels. Generations of readers have also delighted in Dickens' wonderful description of the London boarding-house - 'Todgers'.

In his last completed novel, published in 1864-5, Dicens confirmed his reputation as a story-teller of genius while extending the sphere of his imagination to new worlds. Like all Dickens' novels, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND weaves together many stories, uniting them in the bizarre symbolism of the wealth which derives from a rubbish tip. With all the energy of his earlier novels, this one has an extra resonance and depth of shade.

With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, University of Kent at Canterbury. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz). Bleak House is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. It is at once a complex mystery story that fully engages the reader in the work of detection, and an unforgettable indictment of an indifferent society. Its representations of a great city's underworld, and of the law's corruption and delay, draw upon the author's personal knowledge and experience. But it is his symbolic art that projects these things in a vision that embraces black comedy, cosmic farce, and tragic ruin. In a unique creative experiment, Dickens divides the narrative between his heroine, Esther Summerson, who is psychologically interesting in her own right, and an unnamed narrator whose perspective both complements and challenges hers.

Charles Dickens had an understanding of mid-Victorian society second to none, and genius and energy massive enough to make the absurdities and terrors of that society come alive on the page. Nicholas Nickleby, with its episodes of chicanery in finance and education, and the dramatic intensity with which it tells the story of its openhearted young protagonist and its frightening villain, the magnificently rendered Ralph Nickleby, represents Dickens at his clear-eyed, indignant, and mesmerizing best. When Nicholas Nickleby is left penniless by the death of his father, he appeals to his Uncle Ralph to help him and his mother and sister. But Ralph conceives a violent hatred of the young man, and his schemes of persecution haunt Nicholas through a series of picaresque adventures, including a job as a tutor at a horrific school for unwanted boys run by the cruel Wackford Squeers and a stint as a member of the eccentric Crummles family theater troupe. Without shying away from the grimmer aspects of the world Nicholas encounters on his path to eventual happiness, the story remains one of Dickens's most high-spirited and exuberant. This edition reprints the original Everyman preface by G. K. Chesterton and includes thirty-nine illustrations by Phiz.

Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly old skinflint. He hates everyone, especially children. But at Christmas three ghosts come to visit him, scare him into mending his ways, and he finds, as he celebrates with Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and their family, that geniality brings its own reward. This finest of all Christmas stories is beautifully illustrated with Arthur Rackham’s superb line drawings.

Bursting with energy and populated by a whole world of inimitable and memorable characters - including especially the theatrical troupe with whom Nicholas performs - the book is both a griping story and a series of magnificent scenes.

Great Expectations was first published as a weekly serial in All the Year Round, December 1860 - August 1861. Its first appearance in volume form was as three-volume novel, without illustrations, in July 1861. A one-volume edition, the next year, preceded its inclusion in the collected editions of Dickens's lifetime. The three-volume 1861 edition is the basis of the present text: variant readings, including those in manuscript and extant proofs, are recorded in the textual apparatus, providing an unusually rich source of information on Dickens's methods of composition. The Introduction traces this process of composition and draws attention to the two unperformed dramatic adaptations: the reading version and the 1861 play version, made as a safeguard of copyright. Appendices include the original ending, the author's notes, and two textual examinations, one of the five so-called `editions' of 1861, the other a comparison of the one-volume 1862 edition with the 1864 Library edition.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens’ greatest historical novel, traces the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror. Dickens based his historical detail on Carlyle’s great work – The French Revolution. ‘The best story I have written’ was Dickens’ own verdict on A Tale of Two Cities, and the reader is unlikely to disagree with this judgement of a story which combines historical fact with the author’s unsurpassed genius for poignant tales of human suffering, self-sacrifice, and redemption.

This brilliantly coloured tale of the French Revolution is an historical romance set in Paris and London. Famous for the character of Sidney Carton who sacrifices himself upon the guillotine' it is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done '- the novel is also a powerful study of crowd psychology and the dark emotions aroused by the Revolution, illuminated by Dickens' lively comedy

The editor has corrected printers’ errors and annotated unfamiliar terms and allusions. Three illustrations by George Cruikshank and a map of Oliver's London accompany the text. "Backgrounds and Sources" focuses on The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, central both to Dickens and to the characters in Oliver Twist. The act’s far-reaching implications are considered in source materials that include parlimentary debates on The Poor Laws, a harrowing account of an 1835 Bedfordshire riot, and "An Appeal to Fallen Women," Dickens’ 1847 open letter to London’s prostitutes urging them to turn their backs on "debauchery and neglect." Ten letters on Oliver Twist, written between 1837 and 1864, are reprinted, including those to the novel’s publisher, the novel’s illustrator, and John Forster, Dickens’ close friend and future biographer. In addition, readers can trace the evolution of the novel by examining Dickens’ installment and chapter-division plans and enjoy "Sikes and Nancy," the text of a public reading Dickens composed and performed often to large audiences. "Early Reviews" provides eight witty, insightful, and at times impassioned responses to the novel and to Oliver’s plight by William Makepeace Thackeray and John Forster (anonymously), among others. "Criticism" includes twenty of the most significant interpretations of Oliver Twist published in this century. Included are essays by Henry James, George Gissing, Graham Greene, J. Hillis Miller, Harry Stone, Philip Collins, John Bayley, Keith Hollingsworth, Steven Marcus, Monroe Engel, James R. Kincaid, Michael Slater, Dennis Walder, Burton M. Wheeler, Janet Larson, Fred Kaplan, Robert Tracy, David Miller, John O. Jordan, and Gary Wills. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.