Hablot Knight Browne

The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness";...

Suddenly fatherless and penniless, young Nicholas Nickleby can find no help for himself and his family. His uncle Ralph may be rich, but he is neither a kind nor an honorable man, so it is up to Nicholas to take responsibility. His adventures in Victorian England will take Nicholas to a job at a boys' school run by a brutal and dictatorial headmaster, a London slum, and a theater troupe where he works under an assumed name and into a web of revenge,...

For decades, William Dorrit has been confined to Marshalsea, a debtor&;s prison, which he cannot leave until he pays what he owes&;meanwhile preventing him from getting a job in order to do so. His daughter Amy, born in Marshalsea, is now old enough to provide some help by earning money as a seamstress, and is free to come and go from the prison as she pleases. It is during one of her journeys to the outside world that she meets Arthur Clennam. Amy...

Charles Dickens's classic story of orphan David Copperfield growing up in nineteenth-century England.