Hablot Knight Browne

Set at the time of the Gordon anti-Catholic riots of 1780, the novels atmosphere is madness, power, murder, mob violence. It is a tale, also, of thwarted love by the designs of Geoffrey Haredale and the villain Sir John Chester, and the heroism of Edward Chester in rescuing the innocent Emma. Other characters include Lord George Gordon himself, and Grip, the raven who inspired Edgar Allen Poe's poem.

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";...

"Nicholas Nickleby" combines comedy and tragedy in a tale of triumph over adversity, where Nickleby succeeds despite poverty, the indifference of his wealthy uncle, the tyranny of wicked schoolmaster Wackford Squeers and the social injustice that he encounters throughout the institutional system, meeting such eccentric characters as the Crummles, the Kenwigs, Newman Noggs and businessmen, the Cheeryble brothers along the way. Here, Dickens uses his...

When David Copperfield's widowed mother remarries, David suffers from his stepfather's abuse. At age 8, David is sent away to a harsh school where the principal routinely beats the students. David's circumstances become even worse when he is removed from school and, at age 10, forced to labor from morning to night in a London warehouse. David then decides to take desperate action. He will run away to his great-aunt, who lives in Dover. Having never...

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained...

Comedy, sentiment, and social criticism as Mr. Pickwick rescues Mr. Peepers from debtors' prison.

A young boy in nineteenth-century London runs away from an unhappy home, finds employment in a wine factory, and becomes acquainted with a wide variety of characters in the city streets.