James Catnach (1792 1841) became famous for publishing satirical ballads and sensational accounts of famous murders in his daily broadsheets, first printed in his own home in Seven Dials, London. Capitalising on the turbulent times, Catnach grew rich on producing lurid descriptions of crimes and the trials and executions that followed them. His imagination occasionally over-stepped the mark; he was once jailed for libel after claiming that a local butcher made his sausages from human flesh. This sympathetic and entertaining biography of Catnach, first published in 1878 by London raconteur...

George Dolby (? 1900) was the manager of Charles Dickens' highly successful reading tours in England and America between 1866 and 1870. He published this memoir of Dickens in 1885. Dickens was a keen amateur actor and had many friends involved with the theatre. He had begun public readings from his works in 1853 for charity, but in 1858 his first for-profit tour, lasting three months, covered much of England, Scotland and Ireland, and netted over 10,000. Without props or costumes, he brought his most popular characters to life, and continued to undertake lengthy and exhausting tours until...

This selection from the letters of Charles Dickens (1812 70) was edited (as it says on the title page) 'by his sister-in-law and his eldest daughter'. The former was Georgina Hogarth (1827 1917), who stayed in Dickens' household and cared for the family when the author separated from his wife, her sister, in 1858; the latter was Mary (1838 96), known in the family as Mamie, his favourite child. They had published a three-volume edition in 1880, and a 'New Edition' in 1882; this reissue is of the single-volume third edition of 1893. The collection was seen as a 'supplement' to Forster's life...

The novels of Charles Dickens (1812 70), with their inimitable energy and their comic, tragic and grotesque characters, are still widely read, and reworked for film and television. The first book edition of Great Expectations was published in three volumes in 1861. It is now reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection simultaneously with the serialised version, published in Dickens' periodical All the Year Round in 1860 1, and a volume of newly photographed actual-size colour images of the entire original manuscript. Dickens himself had the manuscript bound and presented to his friend...

'George Eliot' was the pseudonym of Marian Evans (1819 80), possibly the greatest of the Victorian novelists, whose works include The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871 2) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Her personal life was complex she was an independent woman who challenged social conventions. Her friend, Eton master and historian Oscar Browning (1837 1923), was moved to write this affectionate assessment of her life, and it was published in 1890, offering 'no claims ... but a friendship of fifteen years, and a deep and unswerving devotion to her mind and character'. Browning takes a...

Known as 'the great northern diver' to his crewmates, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 1930) fell into the Arctic Ocean on three occasions during his voyage as doctor on a whaler, before becoming part of the harpooning crew. This adventure sets the scene for the remarkable variety of his later life. In his autobiography, first published in 1923, he details everything from that first voyage to his literary success, his collaboration with playwright J. M. Barrie (whose Sherlock Holmes parody is included), and his involvement in the setting up of volunteer groups during the First World War. He...

Best known now for his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 1930) was also an astute and entertaining critic. In this collection of essays first published in 1907, he takes the reader on a tour of his own bookshelf and explores an eccentric range of topics, from the unreasonable opinions of Samuel Johnson to the deficiencies of Ivanhoe and the fascination of Treasure Island. While the importance of deep, intellectual reading is emphasised throughout, across an impressive scope of scientific and literary subjects, Conan Doyle is also firm in his belief that popular fiction is...

F. J. Harvey Darton (1878 1936) published Life and Times in 1910. It is an account of the life and work of the well-loved children's author and educationalist Mary Martha Sherwood (1775 1851). Sherwood, a prolific writer, published numerous bestsellers, including the didactic series The History of the Fairchild Family (1818 47) and The History of Henry Milner (1822 37). Sherwood was also passionately involved in education; she established a number of schools both in England and in India, where she lived for 11 years from 1805, and where she became an evangelical Christian. Darton's account is...

Edmund Gosse (1849 1928), author and literary critic, held posts as a lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, and librarian to the House of Lords; he was honoured with a knighthood in 1925. His 1897 history of English literature (of which the version reissued here was published a year later by William Heinemann as Volume 3 in the series Short Histories of the Literatures of the World) traces the nation's greatest literature, from Chaucer to Tennyson, across eleven chapters. Rather than concentrating on biographical or sociological detail of English literary history, Gosse's book instead...

When the Countess of Blessington (1789 1849) met the poet Lord Byron (1788 1824) in Genoa in 1823 she noted that 'the impression of the first few minutes disappointed me'. Despite this precarious start, they struck up a friendship and met nearly every day for two months. Byron had been living in the Italian port city since the previous autumn and Blessington and her family had arrived in April 1823. Her account of their conversations was not published until 1834, a decade after Byron's death. Blessington expresses candid opinions about the poet in this work, writing that Byron 'is a strange...