On the 9th of June 1865, Charles Dickens was travelling aboard the Folkestone to London Boat Train with his mistress and her mother, when it derailed while crossing a viaduct near Staplehurst in Kent. The train plunged down a bank into a dry river bed, killing ten passengers, and badly wounding forty. Dickens was profoundly affected by the disaster, and a year later, he published The Signalman, a supremely atmospheric ghost story in which the narrator, while investigating a dank and lonely railway cutting, meets the signalman who lives there. His new acquaintance appears to live under the...

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is one of the author's briefest but most cherished works. The novella shares the story of the miser Ebenezer Scrooge, freed from slavery to his own petty greed. The inspirational narrative has been adapted into many forms, weaving its way into the cultural consciousness and shaping our idea of the true meaning of "Christmas spirit." Secular in its themes, but deeply moral, A Christmas Carol contains a message of unselfishness applicable every day of the year.

One Christmas Eve, after being particularly cruel to his employee, the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, who tells him that he will be visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, Future. Each ghost shows him things that rekindle the joy and spirit of Christmas within his heart and awaken his goodwill toward his fellow man. In typical fashion, Dickens deals with social injustice in a way that transcends the 19th century. This illustrated version of the classic holiday tale is brough to life with an illustrated Character List...

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...

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...

While Charles Dickens is best known and celebrated for his prolific journalistic output and novelistic creations, he also devoted some of his creative energies to verse. At turns sentimental, melancholy, playful, humorous and satirical, and ranging considerably in tone and format - from songs to narrative prologues for novels and squibs for newspapers - the poems in this collection highlight Dickens's gift for language and his unfailing power to touch.

Charles Dickens (1812-70) was an established novelist when he decided to produce a Christmas story, which was written in only six weeks and published at the end of 1843. The book was an immediate bestseller, and had it not been for the very high production costs of the specially commissioned illustrations and the decorative binding, it would have been a great commercial success. This strategic error meant that Dickens did not make the profits he expected, which contributed to his falling out with the publishers, Chapman and Hall. The story, however, has endured to this day as a classic and...