Bleak House opens in a London shrouded by fog—a fog that swirls most densely about the Court of Chancery, where the obscure case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce lies lost in endless litigation,...

"Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding," says Scrooge. Mean old Scrooge despises Christmas, until Christmas Eve, when a haunted voice...

David Copperfield is the timeless tale of a thoughtful orphan discovering how to live and love in a cutthroat, indifferent adult world. It firmly embraces all the eternal freshness, the comic...

The great American author John Irving calls Great Expectations "the novel that made me want to be a novelist-specifically, to move a reader as I was moved". Irving is merely one of the most recent...

One of the most revered works in English literature, Great Expectations traces the coming-of-age of a young orphan, Pip, from a boy of shallow aspirations into a man of self-possession. From...

Set in London's backstreet slums, Oliver Twist is the story of a workhouse orphan captured and thrust into a den of thieves, where some of Dickens's most depraved villains preside: the...