Born and raised in the appalling deprivation of a Victorian-era London workhouse, the orphan Oliver escapes the drudgery of apprenticeship only to fall into the hands of the notorious Fagin and his gang of child thieves. But Oliver is an innocent at heart and the attempts by Fagin and the impudently witty Artful Dodger to teach the boy the trick of the pick-pocket's trade lead only to his almost immediate capture. Oliver's rescue by the kindly Mr....

"Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis have lost their father. He has disappeared and, with him, their happy life in London too. They have a new life now, in a new place, in a new (but truly quite old and shabby) home beyond the train tracks. Each day of this new life, they greet the 9.15am train and hope it carries their love to Father, wherever he has gone. But the railway promises to bring something else entirely . . . Along its tracks, the siblings will stumble...

A collection of critical essays on Austen and her works. Also includes a chronology of events in her life.

Examines the theme, characters, plot, style and technique of more than 700 nineteenth- and twentieth-century works by prominent authors from around the world.

"Magisterial . . . make[s] you suddenly see new things in familiar books . . . brilliant analyses of a dozen or so front-runners in the Great American Novel sweepstakes." -Michael Dirda, Virginia Quarterly Review The idea of "the great American novel" continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying more than 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. In this landmark book, the first in many...

The first chapter describes such circumstances in the lives of the novelists themselves as would be likely to influence their attitudes to the Woman Question, as it was beginning to be classed: their homes, their temperaments, their education, their careers as writers. The next four chapters largely abandon the biographical approach and concentrate critically on the novels as novels and in particular on the way in which the authors present not only...