This book content includes:
A Christmas Tree
What Christmas is as we Grow Older
The Poor Relation's Story
The Child's Story
The Schoolboy's Story
Nobody's Story
The Old Curiosity Shop is a novel by Charles Dickens. The plot follows the life of Nell Trent and her grandfather, both residents of The Old Curiosity Shop in London.
The Old Curiosity Shop was one of two novels (the other being Barnaby Rudge) which Dickens published along with short stories in his weekly serial Master Humphrey's Clock, which lasted from 1840 to 1841. It was so popular that New...
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. A Künstlerroman in a modernist style, it traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions...
No Thoroughfare is a stage play and novel by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, both released in December 1867.
In 1867 Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins collaborated to produce a stage play titled No Thoroughfare: A Drama: In Five Acts. This was the last stage production to be associated with Dickens, who died in June 1870. The play opened at the Adelphi Theatre on 26 December 1867. The novel...
The Uncommercial Traveller is a collection of literary sketches and reminiscences written by Charles Dickens.
In 1859 Dickens founded a new journal called All the Year Round and the Uncommercial Traveller articles would be among his main contributions. He seems to have chosen the title and persona of the Uncommercial Traveller as a result of a speech he gave on 22 December 1859 to the Commercial...
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses is an 1895 essay by Mark Twain, written as a satire and criticism of the writings of James Fenimore Cooper. Drawing on examples from The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder from Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, the essay claims Cooper is guilty of verbose writing, poor plotting, glaring inconsistencies, overused clichés, cardboard characterizations, and a host...
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America in the era now referred to as the Gilded Age. Although not one of Twain's best-known works, it has appeared in more than one hundred editions since its original publication. Twain and Warner originally had planned to issue the novel with...
The Odyssey (/ˈɒdəsi/; Greek: Ὀδύσσεια, Odýsseia) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second oldest extant work of Western...
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories is a collection of short semi-comic mystery stories that were written by Oscar Wilde and published in 1891. It includes:
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
The Canterville Ghost
The Sphinx Without a Secret
The Model Millionaire
In later editions, another story, The Portrait of Mr. W. H., was added to the collection.
The title of this essay has it right - these are just a series of stories about a trip that Twain and some friends took to Bermuda from New York City. Twain wrote this for "The Atlantic" in 1877 and his wry style makes him an excellent travel companion.
In reality, Twain's story of the trip is the story of the people he meets along the way. Most of the stories are humorous, some are duds and...
In response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Dickens advocated genocide against the Indian race writing the allegorical The Perils of Certain English Prisoners. In Perils Dickens describes the "native Sambo", a paradigm of the Indian mutineers, as a "double-dyed traitor, and a most infernal villain" who takes part in a massacre of women and children, in an allusion to the Cawnpore Massacre.
A Tale of a Tub was the first major work written by Jonathan Swift. It is arguably his most difficult satire, and perhaps his most masterly. The Tale is aprose parody which is divided into sections of "digression" and a "tale" of three brothers, each representing one of the main branches of western Christianity. Composed between 1694 and 1697, it was eventually published in 1704.
A Tale was long...
Northanger Abbey /ˈnɔrθˌæŋɡər/ was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed for publication, though she had previously made a start on Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. According to Cassandra Austen's Memorandum, Susan (as it was first called) was written circa 1798-99. It was revised by Austen for the press in 1803, and sold in the same year for £10...
The Wreck of the Golden Mary is the work of many hands but was originally started by Dickens. The story portrays an amazing voyage around Cape Horn, then north to the coast of California. The tale takes a stunning turn when the ship strikes an iceberg and passengers and crew languish in lifeboats. Dickens’s subtlety of style and picturesque depiction keeps reader rapt till the very...
Going into Society is Dickens's story of a man who sets up a circus in a respectable neighborhood. The main attraction is a dwarf: "He was a un-common small man, he really was. Certainly not so small as he was made out to be, but where IS your Dwarf as is?"
Prester John is a 1910 adventure novel by John Buchan. It tells the story of a young Scotsman named David Crawfurd and his adventures in South Africa, where a Zulu uprising is tied to the medieval legend of Prester John. Crawfurd is similar in many ways to Buchan's later character, Richard Hannay.
It contains the notable line: "Perfect love casteth out fear, the Bible says; but, to speak it...
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (commonly known as Martin Chuzzlewit) is a novel by Charles Dickens, considered the last of his picaresque novels. It was originally serialised in 1843 and 1844. Dickens thought it to be his best work, but it was one of his least popular novels. Like nearly all of Dickens' novels, Martin Chuzzlewit was released to the public in monthly instalments....
Reprinted in its entirety for the first time since its original publication in 1862, Somebody's Luggage is a rediscovered gem from Dickens's later life.
Stumbling upon some luggage that has been left behind in the hotel where he works, a waiter searches through it to identify its owner. He fails to discover this, but he does find, secreted away in different parts of the luggage, quite a number...
The story traces the life of David Copperfield from childhood to maturity. David was born in Blunderstone, Suffolk, near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England, in 1820, six months after the death of his father. David spends his early years with his mother and their housekeeper, Peggotty. When he is seven years old his mother marries Edward Murdstone. David is given good reason to dislike his...