Charles Dickens

The words 'Merry Christmas' first appeared in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", which has become probably the best-loved of all Christmas stories, and it appears here with the four other stories that combined to make "The Christmas Books", first published in 1852. Somehow, Christmas and ghost stories go well together, and here too Dickens was a...

This novel includes an introduction and notes by Dinny Thorold, University of Westminster and is 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...

'I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,' said the Spirit. 'Look upon me!' A celebration of Christmas, a tale of redemption and a critique on Victorian society, Dickens' atmospheric novella follows the miserly, penny-pinching Ebenezer Scrooge who views Christmas as 'humbug'. It is only through a series of eerie, life-changing visits from the ghost of...

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...

"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage." Set in fictitious Coketown, England during the Industrial Revolution of the 1850s, Dickens wished to expose the enormous gulf between the rich and...

Edwin Drood is contracted to marry orphan Rosa when he comes of age, but when they find that duty has gradually replaced affection, they agree to break the engagement off. Shortly afterwards, in the middle of a storm on Christmas Eve, Edwin Drood disappears, leaving nothing but some personal belongings and the suspicion that his jealous uncle John...