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";...

Tells the tale of Walter Hartright, who encounters a woman all dressed in white on a moonlit road in Hampstead. Hartright helps the woman to find her way back to London. The woman warns him against an unnamed baronet and after they part he discovers that she may have escaped from an insane asylum. Hartright travels to Cumberland where he takes up a position as the art tutor of Laura Fairlie and her devoted half-sister, Marian Halcombe, who are somehow...

The Pickwick Papers was Dicken's response to his publisher's request for a monthly series of sporting sketches. It became the most famous of all pre-Victorian novels. The central characters, Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller, are as familiar today as they became on publication, and there are over a hundred other speaking parts. The action is set in the late Georgian period of the writer's earliest youth, drawing on experience and acute observation ranging...

Charles Bovary, an unremarkable man who becomes a country doctor in the north of France. During one of his rounds he falls under the spell of Emma Rouault, the beautiful daughter of one of his patients. When Bovary's wife unexpectedly passes away, he marries Emma, whose expectation of life becomes increasingly unfulfilled. After the birth of her child, she spins into a series of uncontrollable urges and bad choices that leads to her tragic downfall....