Charles Dickens

Widely considered to be Dickens's greatest satire on poverty, Little Dorrit is the story of Amy "Little" Dorrit's struggle to hold her poverty-stricken family together in the face of her father's imprisonment in the Marshalsea debtor's prison. Called the "child of the Marshalsea," Little Dorrit struggles to support her family as a seamstress while dreaming of a future free of the Marshalsea.

Little Dorrit was originally published as a serial

“Facts alone are wanted in life.” The children at Mr. Gradgrind’s school are sternly ordered to stifle their imaginations and pay attention only to cold, hard reality. The effects of Gradgrind’s teaching on his own children, Tom and Louisa, are particularly profound and leave them ill-equipped to deal with the unpredictable desires of the human heart. Luckily for them, they have a friend in Sissy Jupe, the child of a circus

No writer is more identified with the modern idea of Christmas than Charles Dickens. In some ways, Dickens helped define the holiday that we now celebrate by immortalizing it as a time of warmth and sharing, with an emphasis on family and friends.

Dickens wrote all the stories presented here during the 1850s as contributions to the special Christmas issues of Household Words, the weekly magazine he founded and edited. Included are fictional

The most gorgeously theatrical of all Dickens' novels, Nicholas Nickleby follows the delightful adventures of a hearty young hero in nineteenth-century England. Nicholas, a gentleman's son fallen upon hard times, must set out to make his way in the world. His journey is accompanied by some of the most swaggering scoundrels and unforgettable eccentrics in Dickens' pantheon.

From the dungeon-like Yorkshire boys' boarding school run by the cruel