Dickens' first historical novel is set against the famous No Popery riots instigated by Lord George Gordon in 1780. Prejudice and intolerance are woven into the mysterious tale of a long unsolved murder and a forbidden romance.

A testament to the energy and creativity of a writer and journalist without equal, Charles Dickens's Selected Journalism 1850-1870 is edited with an introduction and notes by David Pascoe in Penguin Classics. Throughout his writing career Charles Dickens was a hugely prolific journalist. This volume of his later work is selected from pieces that he wrote after he founded the journal Household Words in 1850, up until his death in 1870. Here subjects as varied as his nocturnal walks around London slums, prisons, theatres and Inns of Court, journeys to the continent and his childhood in Kent and London are captured in remarkable pieces such as 'Night Walks', 'On Strike', 'New Year's Day' and 'Lying Awake'. Aiming to catch the imagination of a public besieged by hack journalism, these writings are an extraordinary blend of public and private, news and recollection, reality and fantastic description. David Pascoe's introduction traces the development of Dickens's career as a journalist and examines his fusion of real events with flights of fancy. This edition also includes explanatory notes, a bibliography and a Dickens chronology. Charles Dickens is one of the best-loved novelists in the English language, whose 200th anniversary was celebrated in 2012. His most famous books, including Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and The Pickwick Papers, have been adapted for stage and screen and read by millions. If you enjoyed Selected Journalism 1850 - 1870, you might like Dickens's Sketches by Boz, also available in Penguin Classics.

Charles Dickens' last, unfinished novel, published for the first time as a Wordsworth Classic.

Born six months after his father's death, David faces many hardships growing up in nineteenth-century England.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”

With those famous words unfolds a tale that renews the joy and caring that are Christmas. Whether we read it aloud with our family and friends or open the pages on a chill winter evening to savor the story in solitude, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is a very special holiday experience.

It is the one book that every year will warm our hearts with favorite memories of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future—and will remind us with laughter and tears that the true Christmas spirit comes from giving with love.

With a heartwarming account of Dickens' first reading of the Carol, and a biographical sketch.

Presents adaptations of three classic Christmas stories.

}Wordsworth Classics{ edition of Dickens' last complete novel; a comprehensive and penetrating account of Victorian society.

Seven-year-old Pip is an orphan. He lives with his nasty older sister and works as a blacksmith's apprentice. Pip dreams of a better life, but has no idea how to turn his luck around. Then a mysterious stranger decides to make all of Pip's dreams come true. Pip's lonely life is about to change forever. Will his great expectations be realized? Or will he learn that money and power are worthless without love and friendship?

Sketches by Boz collected a rich and strange mixture of reportage, observation, fancy and fiction centred on the metropolis. It was Dickens's first book, published when he was twenty-four, and in it we find him walking the London streets, in theatres, pawnshops, lawcourts, prisons, along the Thames and on the omnibus, missing nothing, recording and transforming urban and suburban life into new terrain for literature.
'The first sprightly runnings of his genius are undoubtedly here,' wrote Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster. Sketches is a remarkable achievement, and looks towards Dickens's giant novels in its profusion of characters, its glimpses of surreal modernity and its limitless fund of pathos and comic invention.

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For the character of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, Dickens drew on a tragedy in his own life, the death at the age of seventeen of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth. Five years later he wrote, 'the desire to be buried next her is as strong upon me now ... and I know (for I don't think there ever was love like that I bear her) that it will never diminish.'

Widely regarded as Dickens's masterpiece, Bleak House centers on the generations-long lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce, through which “whole families have inherited legendary hatreds.” Focusing on Esther Summerson, a ward of John Jarndyce, the novel traces Esther's romantic coming-of-age and, in classic Dickensian style, the gradual revelation of long-buried secrets, all set against the foggy backdrop of the Court of Chancery. Mixing romance, mystery, comedy, and satire, Bleak House limns the suffering caused by the intricate inefficiency of the law.