Londres au XVIIIeme siecle. Les protestants transcendes par Lord George Gordon se rebellent contre le parlement et les catholiques. De sanglantes emeutes eclatent un peu partout dans la region londonienne, qui vont conduire la foule galvanisee au meurtre et au saccage. Une histoire dramatique immortalisee par un grand auteur.

L'action du roman concerne un ancien meurtre perpetre dans une petite ville non loin de Londres, sur quoi se greffent, quelque vingt-cinq ans apres, les emeutes anti-catholiques dites Gordon Riots, conduites par Lord George Gordon, qui, du 2 au 10 juin 1780 a Londres, ont provoque de tres importants degats et fait de nombreuses victimes.

Nell, da quando si e ritrovata senza genitori, vive col nonno materno, unico parente rimastole al mondo oltre al fratello maggiore (che pero vive lontano), conducendo un'esistenza solitaria ed appartata, quasi interamente dedicata al prendersi amorevolmente cura del caro vecchio. Il suo unico amico e Kit, giovane commesso di bottega a cui lei cerca d'insegnar a scrivere.

Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.

Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.

Like Nesbit's The Railway Children, the story begins when a group of children move from London to the countryside of Kent. The five children - Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their baby brother, known as the Lamb - are playing in a gravel pit when they uncover a rather grumpy, ugly, and occasionally malevolent Psammead or sand-fairy, who has the ability to grant wishes. He persuades the children to take one wish each day to be shared among them, with the caveat that the wishes will turn to stone at sunset.

The story opens with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Petersburg. He contemplates how he has always been a ridiculous person, and also, how recently, he has come to the realization that nothing much matters to him any more. It is this revelation that leads him to the idea of suicide. The narrator of the story reveals that he had bought a revolver months previous with the intent of shooting himself in the head.

Notes from Underground, also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld, is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.

The novel chronicles the life of 19-year-old intellectual, Arkady Dolgoruky, illegitimate child of the controversial and womanizing landowner Versilov. A focus of the novel is the recurring conflict between father and son, particularly in ideology, which represents the battles between the conventional -old- way of thinking in the 1840s and the new nihilistic point of view of the youth of 1860s Russia. Whereas the young of Arkady's time embraced a very negative opinion of Russian culture in contrast to Western or European culture.

Varvara Dobroselova and Makar Devushkin are second cousins twice-removed and live across from each other on the same street in terrible apartments. Devushkin's, for example, is merely a portioned-off section of the kitchen, and he lives with several other tenants, such as the Gorshkovs, whose son who groans in agonizing hunger almost the entire story and eventually dies. Devushkin and Dobroselova exchange letters attesting to their terrible living conditions and the former frequently squanders his money on gifts for her.