As the bicentennary of the French Revolution draws near, Dickens' historical novel serves as a timely reminder of nineteenth-century reactions to that great upheaval. Set between 1757 and 1793, A Tale of Two Cities views the causes and effects of the Revolution from an essentially private point of view, showing how private experience relates to public history. Dickens' characters are fictional, and their political activity is minimal, yet all are drawn towards the Paris of the Terror, and all become caught up in its web of human suffering and human sacrifice. This edition includes extensive explanatory notes giving crucial background information about the Revolution and Dickens' sources. 'the best story I have written' Charles Dickens.

The quintessential novel from England's most beloved novelist, David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful author.

Great Expectations includes some of Dickens`s most memorable characters — Magwitch, Miss Havisham, Estella — encountered by young Pip as he grows into adulthood. This edition features a wide-ranging introduction, Dickens`s working notes, the original ending and the definitive Clarendon text.

Helbling Readers Red Series is aimed at young teenagers. It includes a selection of adapted classics and original fiction to get your students reading for pleasure right from beginner level.

This is one of Dickens' earliest collections of stories. Intended for the holiday season, A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire offers tales of romance, theft, justice and heart-warming family reunions. Continuing the tradition of ghost stories for Christmas, some of the haunting tales are inspiring while others are chilling. The voices of this round include servants and employers alike — host and charwoman, mother and nursemaid — and some surprising ruminations on topics as diverse as disability and interracial love.

A retelling of Dickens' famous novel about the trials and tribulations of the poor young orphan boy, Oliver. Follow his journey from the appalling conditions of a nineteenth-century workhouse to London.

This illustrated edition of the yuletide classic features 12 full-color plates plus 18 black-and-white drawings. The timeless appeal of Rackham's evocative illustrations form the perfect complement to the master storyteller's wise and witty prose. Dickens's immortal tale still sends a message that strikes the reader's heart and soul.

Compiled by Charles Dickens, Mugby Junction is a intriguing composite of tales ranging from horror to a realistic portrayal of life around a bustling Victorian railway station. Published for the first time in its entirety, it contains one of Dickens's most celebrated ghost stories, The Signalman. Arriving at Mugby Junction in an attempt to escape his unhappy past, Barbox Brothers befriends a workman and his invalid daughter. With their help he sets his sights on discovering which of the seven lines of the junction will most aid him in his journey of escape. In exploring one such line, he meets the woman he had lost, only to return to Mugby Junction once this has played out. Staying there, and continuing his friendship with the workman and his daughter, he collects together the myriad stories he hears tell of at the junction.

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There 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 lanes of London, they are all drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror and soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.

Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from any young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman and 'bully of humanity' Mr Bounderby, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery. And, as their fortunes cross with those of free-spirited circus girl Sissy Jupe and victimized weaver Stephen Blackpool, Gradgrind is eventually forced to recognize the value of the human heart in an age of materialism and machinery.

Little Dorrit is a classic tale of imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical, while Dickens' working title for the novel, Nobody's Fault, highlights its concern with personal responsibility in private and public life. Dickens' childhood experiences inform the vivid scenes in Marshalsea debtor's prison, while his adult perceptions of governmental failures shape his satirical picture of the Circumlocution Office. The novel's range of characters — the honest, the crooked, the selfish and the self-denying — offers a portrait of society about whose values Dickens had profound doubts.

The Pickwick Papers is Dickens first novel and widely regarded as one of the major classics of comic writing in English. Originally serialised in monthly instalments, it quickly became a huge popular success with sales reaching 40,000 by the final number. In the century and a half since its first appearance, the characters of Mr Pickwick, Sam Weller and the whole of the Pickwickian crew have entered the consciousness of all who love English literature in general, and the works of Dickens in particular. Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения.

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.

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.

This popular series of readers has now been completely revised and updated, using a new syllabus and new word structure lists. Readability has been ensured by means of specially designed computer software. Words that are above level but essential to the story are explained within the text, illustrated, and then reused for maximum reinforcement.

This popular series of readers has now been completely revised and updated, using a new syllabus and new word structure lists. Readability has been ensured by means of specially designed computer software. Words that are above level but essential to the story are explained within the text, ilustrated, and then reused for maximum reinforcement.

This popular series of readers has now been completely revised and updated, using a new syllabus and new word structure lists. Readability has been ensured by means of specially designed computer software. Words that are above level but essential to the story are explained within the text, illustrated, and then reused for maximum reinforcement.

This popular series of readers has now been completely revised and updated, using a new syllabus and new word structure lists. Readability has been ensured by means of specially designed computer software. Words that are above level but essential to the story are explained within the text, illustrated, and then reused for maximum reinforcement.

This popular series of readers has now been completely revised and updated, using a new syllabus and new word structure lists. Readability has been ensured by means of specially designed computer software. Words that are above level but essential to the story are explained within the text, illustrated, and then reused for maximum reinforcement.

This 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 The French Revolution, and his own observations and investigations during his numerous visits to Paris.