Charles Dickens
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Pip's life as an ordinary country boy is destined to be unexceptional until a chain of mysterious events lead him away from his humble origins and up the social ladder. His efforts to become a London gentleman bring him into contact not just with the upper classes but also with dangerous criminals. Pip's desire to improve himself is matched only by his longing for the icy-hearted Estella, but secrets from the past impede his progress and he has many...
3) Bleak house
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Bleak House defies a single description. It is a mystery story, in which Esther Summerson discovers the truth about her birth and her unknown mother's tragic life. It is a murder story, which comes to a climax in a thrilling chase, led by one of the earliest detectives in English fiction, Inspector Bucket.
4) Oliver Twist
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Oliver Twist is a classic tale of a boy of unknown parentage born in a workhouse and brought up under the cruel conditions to which pauper children were exposed in the Victorian England. With this novel, Dickens did not merely write a topical satire on the workhouse system and the role of the 1834 New Poor Law in fostering criminality. He created a moral fable about the survival of good, a romance, and a gripping story in which he exploited suspense...
5) Hard times
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“Facts alone are wanted in life.” The children at Mr. Gradgrind’s school are sternly ordered to stifle their imaginations and pay attention only to cold, hard reality. The effects of Gradgrind’s teaching on his own children, Tom and Louisa, are particularly profound and leave them ill-equipped to deal with the unpredictable desires of the human heart. Luckily for them, they have a friend in Sissy Jupe, the child of a circus
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What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth to another. That which is commonly called a long-sight, perceives in a prospect innumerable features and bearings non-existent to a short-sighted person. I sometimes ask myself whether there may occasionally be a difference of this kind between some writers and some readers; whether it is ALWAYS the writer who colours highly, or whether it is now and then the reader whose eye...
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The most gorgeously theatrical of all Dickens’s novels, Nicholas Nickleby follows the delightful adventures of a hearty young hero in nineteenth-century England. Nicholas, a gentleman's son fallen upon hard times, must set out to make his way in the world. His journey is accompanied by some of the most swaggering scoundrels and unforgettable eccentrics in Dickens’s pantheon.
From the dungeon-like Yorkshire boys’ boarding school run by the
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Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster in Cokestown, a northern English village beset by industrialism, runs his family and his school with a rigid adherence to facts, but his daughter's loveless marriage, his son's involvement with gambling and robbery, and his encounters with a variety of characters, force him to recognize the value of the human heart.
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Ebenezer Scrooge is a cranky old mouse who is only concerned with his business and making money. Scrooge thinks Christmas is just a waste of time. But on the night of Christmas Eve, he is visited by three ghosts who take him on a journey through his past, present, and future. His experience could change him forever and teach him the true meaning of Christmas!
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Set against the backdrop of the Gordon Riots of 1780, Barnaby Rudgeis a story of mystery and suspense which begins with an unsolved murder and goes on to involve conspiracy, blackmail, abduction and retribution. Through the course of the novel fathers and sons become opposed, apprentices plot against their masters and anti-Catholic mobs rampage through the streets. And, as London erupts into riot, Barnaby Rudge himself struggles to escape the curse...
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Appears on these lists
2015 Reading Challenge
Coming of Age Stories for Teens
MNPS Summer Reading - High School
The Great American Read
Coming of Age Stories for Teens
MNPS Summer Reading - High School
The Great American Read
Description
The orphaned Pip is serving as a blacksmith's apprentice when an unknown benefactor supplies the means for him to be educated in London as a gentleman of "great expectations."
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Description
The tale of the orphan Oliver, who is sent from the miserable conditions of a workhouse to work for an undertaker. He escapes, only to get caught up with the Artful Dodgers, a street gang of young pickpockets, led by the evil Fagin. Complete and unabridged, this edition features an elastic closure, a chronological listing of the life and times of Charles Dickens, and a new introduction by Monica Feinberg Cohen.
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