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Tag: Charles Dickens

  • Great Expectations

    Pip is an orphan raised by his harsh older sister and her kind husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery, in the Kent marshes. One evening in the churchyard he is seized by an escaped convict and forced to steal food for him, an encounter that will echo through his life. Soon afterwards he is summoned to Satis House to play with Estella, the cold, beautiful ward of the jilted Miss Havisham, who still wears her wedding dress and has stopped every clock.

    Ashamed of his common origins, Pip longs to be worthy of Estella. When a lawyer announces that an unnamed benefactor has given him great expectations of fortune, he moves to London to be educated as a gentleman and assumes Miss Havisham is responsible. City life brings friendship with Herbert Pocket, snobbery and debt, and growing coldness towards Joe.

    Narrated by an older Pip looking back on his younger self, the novel is one of Dickens's most tightly constructed works, mixing comedy, mystery and moral reckoning about class, ambition, loyalty and guilt. Characters such as the lawyer Jaggers, his clerk Wemmick with his castle in Walworth, and the decaying Miss Havisham are among the most vivid Dickens ever created.

    Book details

    AuthorCharles Dickens
    First published1861
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)505
    SettingKent and London, England, early 19th century

    Themes

    • Social class
    • Ambition
    • Guilt
    • Loyalty
    • Self-improvement

    Who should read it

    Readers who want Dickens at his most compact and personal, with memorable characters and a gripping mystery.

    If you liked this, try

    • Oliver Twist
    • David Copperfield
    • Jane Eyre

  • A Tale of Two Cities

    The novel opens in 1775 as Doctor Manette is released after eighteen years of secret imprisonment in the Bastille, his mind damaged so badly that he obsessively makes shoes. His daughter Lucie, raised in England believing him dead, brings him to London, where they are drawn into the treason trial of Charles Darnay, a French emigre who has renounced his aristocratic family.

    Darnay is saved partly thanks to the dissolute barrister Sydney Carton, who looks strikingly like him and who quietly loves Lucie. Meanwhile in the Paris suburb of Saint Antoine, the wine-shop keeper Defarge and his implacable wife knit and plot as resentment against the nobility, embodied by the cruel Marquis St. Evremonde, builds towards revolution and the Terror.

    Shorter and more plot-driven than many Dickens novels, it was serialised in his weekly magazine All the Year Round in 1859. It contrasts the two cities and explores sacrifice, resurrection, mob violence and the cycle of oppression and vengeance. It is often cited as one of the best-selling novels ever published.

    Book details

    AuthorCharles Dickens
    First published1859
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)448
    SettingLondon and Paris, 1775-1793

    Themes

    • Revolution
    • Sacrifice
    • Resurrection
    • Injustice
    • Doubles

    Who should read it

    Readers who like historical drama and want a Dickens novel driven by suspense and the French Revolution.

    If you liked this, try

    • Les Miserables
    • The Scarlet Pimpernel
    • Great Expectations

  • Oliver Twist

    Oliver Twist is born in a provincial workhouse, where his mother dies at once, and grows up under the brutal regime of the Poor Law. After famously asking for more gruel, he is sold as an apprentice to an undertaker, mistreated, and finally runs away on foot to London.

    On the road he meets the Artful Dodger, a swaggering young pickpocket who takes him to Fagin, an old receiver of stolen goods who trains boys to steal. Oliver's innocence is tested when he is caught up in a robbery, rescued by the kindly Mr Brownlow, and pulled back into the underworld by the violent housebreaker Bill Sikes and his partner Nancy, whose conscience becomes central to the plot. A mysterious figure named Monks seems strangely interested in Oliver's fate.

    Serialised in 1837 to 1839, the novel was an attack on the New Poor Law of 1834 and on the treatment of poor children. Its melodrama and caricatures, including a portrayal of Fagin now criticised as antisemitic, sit alongside vivid scenes of London's slums that shocked readers into paying attention.

    Book details

    AuthorCharles Dickens
    First published1838
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)554
    SettingLondon and provincial England, 1830s

    Themes

    • Poverty
    • Child exploitation
    • Crime
    • Innocence
    • Social reform

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in Victorian social history and a fast-moving story of an orphan in the London underworld.

    If you liked this, try

    • Great Expectations
    • Les Miserables
    • David Copperfield