Charles Dickens
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STORY BY Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit
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Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens is a classic tale of imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical, while Dickens' working title for the novel, Nobody's Fault, highlights its concern with personal responsibility in private and public life. Dickens' childhood experiences inform the vivid scenes in Marshalsea debtor's prison, while his adult perceptions of governmental failures shape his satirical picture of the Circumlocution Office. The novel's range of characters - the honest, the crooked, the selfish and the self-denying - offers a portrait of society about whose values Dickens had profound doubts. Little Dorrit is indisputably one of Dickens' finest works, written at the height of his powers. George Bernard Shaw called it ‘a masterpiece among masterpieces’, a vedict shared by the novel's many admirers.
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The Cricket on the Hearth
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The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens. John Peerybingle, a carrier, lives with his young wife Dot, their baby boy and their nanny Tilly Slowboy. A cricket chirps on the hearth and acts as a guardian angel to the family. One day a mysterious elderly stranger comes to visit and takes up lodging at Peerybingle's house for a few days. The life of the Peerybingles intersects with that of Caleb Plummer, a poor toymaker employed by the miser Mr. Tackleton. Caleb has a blind daughter Bertha, and a son Edward, who travelled to South America and is thought to be dead. The miser Tackleton is now on the eve of marrying Edward's sweetheart, May, but she does not love Tackleton. Tackleton tells John Peerybingle that his wife Dot has cheated on him, and shows him a clandestine scene in which Dot embraces the mysterious lodger; the latter, who is in disguise, is actually a much younger man than he seems. John is cut to the heart over this as he loves his wife dearly, but decides after some deliberations to relieve his wife of their marriage contract. In the end, the mysterious lodger is revealed to be none other than Edward who has returned home in disguise. Dot shows that she has indeed been faithful to John. Edward marries May hours before she is scheduled to marry Tackleton. However, Tackleton's heart is melted by the festive cheer (in a manner reminiscent of Ebenezer Scrooge), and he surrenders May to her true love.
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The Pickwick Papers
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The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. Few first novels have created as much popular excitement as The Pickwick Papers - a comic masterpiece that catapulted its twenty-four-year-old author to immediate fame. Readers were captivated by the adventures of the poet Snodgrass, the lover Tupman, the sportsman Winkle and, above all, by that quintessentially English Quixote, Mr Pickwick, and his cockney Sancho Panza, Sam Weller. From the hallowed turf of Dingley Dell Cricket Club to the unholy fracas of the Eatanswill election, via the Fleet debtors' prison, characters and incidents spring to life from Dickens's pen, to form an enduringly popular work of ebullient humour and literary invention.
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The Mystery of Edwin Drood
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The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a novel that is itself the subject of one of literature’s most enduring mysteries. The story recounts the troubled romance of Rosa Bud and the book’s eponymous character, who later vanishes. Was Drood murdered, and if so by whom? All clues point to John Jasper, Drood’s lugubrious uncle, who coveted Rosa. Or did Drood orchestrate his own disappearance? As Charles Dickens died before finishing the book, the ending is intriguingly ambiguous. There is a lot of speculation about how The Mystery of Edwin Drood was to have ended. Dickens didn’t leave any notes or clues outlining the plot so no one will ever really know what he intended. As it has been completed by many different Authors over the years it may have different endings from book to book.
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Hard Times
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Hard Times by Charles Dickens. Dickens’s widely read satirical account of the Industrial Revolution. Dickens creates the Victorian industrial city of Coketown, in northern England, and its unforgettable citizens, such as the unwavering utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the factory owner Josiah Bounderby, and the result is his famous critique of capitalist philosophy, the exploitative force he believed was destroying human creativity and joy.
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Aventures de Monsieur Pickwick - Tome I
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Voici les aventures et mésaventures de l"inénarrable Pickwick et son valet Sam Weller, feuilleton picaresque ayant pour héros un Don Quichotte bedonnant et un Sancho Panza s"exprimant avec l"accent cockney. Un journaliste écrivait, à propos de ce roman: «Une thérapie de choc par le fou rire, un ballon de gaz hilarant»...
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Les grandes espérances
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Pip, orphelin élevé par une soeur revêche, vit rongé par la honte: celle d"être à la charge de son beau-père, le forgeron Joe Garnery - celle d"avoir aidé, dans les marais, un forçat évadé, Magwitch, et celle ,enfin, de sa pauvreté devant Estella, la pupille de la riche Melle Havisham. Il rêve de devenir digne de la conquérir quand on lui annonce que de grandes espérances lui sont permises grâce à un mystérieux mécène. Il part alors pour Londres où il acquiert le vernis social ,et aussi le snobisme ,du gentilhomme. Tout vacille lorsqu"il apprend que son bienfaiteur n"est autre que Magwitch...
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Great Expectations
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Great Expectations is the story of Pip, an orphan boy adopted by a blacksmith"s family, who has good luck and great expectations, and then loses both his luck and his expectations. Through this rise and fall, however, Pip learns how to find happiness.
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Oliver Twist
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An orphan named Oliver Twist meets a pickpocket on the streets of London. From there, he joins a household of boys who are trained to steal for their master.
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