3. STORIES AND ESSAYS BY CHARLES DICKENS

These charming stories quite imbued with the author’s sensitivity and sense of humour are narrated by travellers in Dickens’s early novel "Nicolas Nickleby" (1939) — written when he was only 27 years old — and well deserve to be read and enjoyed on their own by all admirers of the great master of English prose in all its forms.
1. THE FIVE SISTERS OF YORK How the splendid Five Sisters stained-glass window of York Cathedral embodied the memory and life work of five gay young sisters a (...)

A Christmas Carol was a huge hit in both England and the United States when it was published shortly before Christmas in 1843.
This 29,000-word novella was instrumental in reinvigorating popular enthusiasm for the Christmas season among the general public on both sides of the Atlantic, and it established the name Scrooge, and what it stands for, solidly in the English language.
Its utter charm is as effective today as when the book first appeared.
We have reproduced here the splendid (...)

This strikingly original and distinctly off-beat exploration of the mindset and life experiences of a Cheap Jack (a gypsy-like hawker of odd goods at country fairs and public places throughout the land) is darker and more sombre than the tales in his much earlier collections Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Christmas Books (1843-48). It was written and published in 1865 when Dickens was at the height of his literary powers, just after having composed the magnificent Our Mutual Friend, his (...)

William Thackeray, author of the immortal Vanity Fair, wrote a number of other highly-regarded and well-selling novels during his very successful career, notably the well-known historical blockbuster novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, Catherine (whose central character is a rather nasty female criminal!), The History of Pendennis (a major social panorama, partially autobiographical), The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. (a sweeping historical novel set in the early 18th Century), The Virginians (...)