With their immersive storytelling, vivid characters, and powerful social commentary, these books continue to captivate readers of all ages.
Titles in This Set:
1. Great Expectations
2. A Tale of Two Cities
3. Hard Times
4. Oliver Twist
5. A Christmas Carol
Description:
1) Great Expectations
Great Expectations (1861) is one of Dickens' most popular novels. In addition to its endearing hero, Pip - a blacksmith's boy, desperate to escape his humble background - the story is populated by a vivid cast of characters, from the convict Magwitch to Miss Havisham who, jilted long ago, still wears her wedding gown and, for revenge, schools the beautiful young Estella in the art of malice towards men.
2) A Tale of Two Cities
'It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.'
A Tale of Two Cities (1859) moves between two great European capitals, London and Paris, before and during the French Revolution. The struggle between the proletariat and the aristocracy in France and how the implacable hatred between the two threatens to destroy the happiness of exiled French nobleman Charles Darnay and his beautiful wife, Lucie Manette, are the twin themes of the story.
When Darnay risks death by returning to Paris, Sydney Carton, a dissolute barrister who several years earlier had promised to "embrace any sacrifice" for Lucie and those dear to her, sets out to save the young aristocrat, at any price.
3) Hard Times
The backdrop to this campaigning novel is the grim industrial centre of Coketown, with its belching chimneys, purple-dyed river and hordes of downtrodden mill hands. Here headmaster Thomas Gradgrind sternly prepares his pupils for their pre-determined fate as industrial fodder. Facts and figures are all that he will tolerate because he scorns 'fancy' and forbids any use of the imagination.
Gradgrind's own children are brought up on the same bleak doctrine. There will be tragic consequences, both for his submissive daughter Louisa and degenerate son Tom, before their father acknowledges the value of the human heart.
Hard Times is Dickens' shortest novel, yet one of his most politically controversial and hard-hitting.
4) Oliver Twist
Oliver Twist sent out shock waves when it appeared in 1838. With a half-starved orphan for a hero, it was Dickens' first attempt to rouse the public conscience over the social evils of his day.
A parade of memorable characters drives the author's message home: Mr Bumble, the workhouse beadle; Fagin, who runs a den of child thieves; Oliver's streetwise friend, the Artful Dodger; Nancy, the prostitute; and her lover, brutal Bill Sikes.
The adventures of the innocent Oliver - from workhouse to London's underworld, and how he was rescued - is one of Dickens' most popular stories.
5) A Christmas Carol
Every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.'
No Christmas is complete without Charles Dickens' classic morality tale in which rich miser Ebenezer Scrooge is shown the error of his ways after visits by the spectral Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet To Come.
