Charles Dickens
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After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of 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 roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained...
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Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly old skinflint who hates everyone, especially children, but at Christmas three ghosts come to visit him, and scare him into mending his ways. He finds, as he celebrates with Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and family, that geniality brings its own reward.
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"In an overgrown churchyard, a grizzled convict springs upon an orphan named Pip. The convict terrifies the young boy and threatens to kill him unless Pip helps further his escape. Later, Pip finds himself in the ruined garden where he meets the bitter and crazy Miss Havisham and her foster child Estella, with whom he immediately falls in love. After a secret benefactor gives him a fortune, Pip moves to London, where he cultivates great expectations...
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Young David Copperfield's life is happy at first, but he is forced to run away from home following the arrival of his stepfather. David is then adopted by his aunt Betsey and sent to school at Canterbury, where he meets the unctuous Uriah Heep, whose activities lead eventually to David's self-discovery.
5) Oliver Twist
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After orphan Oliver Twist asks for more food, he has to flee the workhouse and ends up on the streets of London. There he meets the Artful Dodger, who leads him to Fagin and his gang of pickpockets. When a thieving mission goes wrong, Oliver narrowly avoids prison and finds himself in the care of kind Mr. Brownlow. But Fagin and the brutal Bill Sikes go in search of the young orphan, determined to drag him back.
6) Bleak House
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This novel is the author's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections, between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in his later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed.
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The emotional tale of Little Nell and her doting grandfather, played out against the backdrop of a cold and brutal London. The twosome abandon their home to escape debt and roam the countryside as beggars. Relentlessly pursued by a malicious moneylender and encountering ne'er-do-wells, con artists, and the persevering poor, they also find goodness and generosity, love and loyalty.
8) Hard times
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Thomas Gradgrind destroys the spiritual and emotional lives of his children by denying the importance of human feelings.
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Of the complex, richly rewarding masterworks he wrote in the last decade of his life, Little Dorrit is the book in which Charles Dickens most fully unleashed his indignation at the fallen state of mid-Victorian society. Crammed with persons and incidents in whose recreation nothing is accidental or spurious, containing, in its picture of the Circumlocution Office, the most witheringly exact satire of a bureaucracy we possess, Little Dorrit is a stunning...
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The Pickwick Papers was Dicken's response to his publisher's request for a monthly series of sporting sketches. It became the most famous of all pre-Victorian novels. The central characters, Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller, are as familiar today as they became on publication, and there are over a hundred other speaking parts. The action is set in the late Georgian perid of the writer's earliest youth, drawing on experience and acute observation ranging...
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Nicholas Nickleby, a gentleman's son fallen upon hard times, must set out to make his way in the world. Along the way various older, money-grubbing villains attempt to injure him. Eventually, with the assistance of kind patrons, he and his family achieve economic security and a happy home.
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Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol under financial duress, but it became one of his most popular and enduring stories. The old miser Ebenezer Scrooge cares nothing for family, friends, love or Christmas. All he cares about is money. Then one Christmas Eve he is visited by three ghosts: Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet To Come. These encounters leave Scrooge deeply moved and forever changed. Historians believe that A Christmas
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John Harmon returns to England as his father's heir. Believed drowned under suspicious circumstances--a situation convenient to his wish for anonymity--John evaluates Bella Wilfer whom he must marry to secure his inheritance. The story is filled with colorful Victorian characters and incidents -- the faded aristocrats and parvenus gathered at the Veneering's dinner table, Betty Higden and her terror of the workhouse and the greedy plottings of Silas...
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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.
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