"First published in 1843, 'A Christmas Carol' is Charles Dickens' touching fable about Ebenezer Scrooge's conversion from miserable penny -pincher to jovial benefactor. On Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by a series of ghosts who show him the error of his ways. With this story, Dickens captured the "spirit of benevolence" we now assume to be the essence of the Christmas Season, and immortalized both himself and his protagonist. This beautiful...

Retellings of twenty of Shakespeare's best known plays, using the playwright's own words when possible.

As a young woman, Anne Shirley is embracing adulthood by becoming a productive member of society making the transition from imaginative student to respected schoolteacher. In this classic coming of age story, Anne navigates various challenges that tempt old habits and test her new maturity. A now 16-year-old Anne continues to live with Marilla in the quaint farming town of Avonlea. While poised to start a new teaching position, Anne struggles to balance...

A complex and profound book, The Tale of Two Cities explores the consequences of tyranny, fate and self-sacrifice. With much of the narrative played out in Paris, during the French Revolution Dickens examines the interplay between personal action, and the flow of history. Dr Manette, having travelled to Paris finds himself imprisoned in the Bastille for 18 brutal years, unable to see his kind and loving daughter Lucy. On his eventual return to London...

From the Publisher: When David Copperfield's widowed mother remarries, David suffers from his stepfather's abuse. At age 8, David is sent away to a harsh school where the principal routinely beats the students. David's circumstances become even worse when he is removed from school and, at age 10, forced to labor from morning to night in a London warehouse. David then decides to take desperate action. He will run away to his great-aunt, who lives...

In the treasured follow-up to Little Women, Jo March returns as a mother of two sons and schoolmaster to twelve orphans. Now Jo Bhaer, literature's beloved heroine has transformed Plumfield, the decorous New England estate of the March sisters' youth, into a progressive school. During the coming year, newcomer Nat Blake joins the other restless, rascally seedlings as they grow under the tutelage of an equally spirited woman who extols the virtues...

How did the whale get his throat? Why was the lazy camel lumbered with a hump? And how did the elephant's insatiable curiosity earn him a trunk? Kipling first invented these delightful stories about the beginning of the world and the first animals in it for his own daughter, Josephine, who tragically died when she was six. Devastated by her loss, Kipling compiled the stories they had shared together into a treasury, which was first published in 1902....

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a violent world, in which two young people fall in love. It is not simply that their families disapprove; the Montagues and the Capulets are engaged in a blood feud. In this death-filled setting, the movement from love at first sight to the lovers' final union in death seems almost inevitable. And yet, this play set in an extraordinary world has become the quintessential story of young love. In part because...

"Hard Times is perhaps the archetypal Dickens novel, full as it is with family difficulties, estrangement, rotten values and unhappiness. It was published in 1854 and it is the story of the family of Thomas Gradgrind, and occurs in the imaginary Coketown, an industrial city inspired by Preston. Gradgrind is a man obsessed with misguided 'Utilitarian' values that make him trust facts, statistics and practicality more than emotion and is based upon...