Carti in categoria Literature & Biography

"As the boat moved silently over the water, the thing at the end of the rope always followed. Sometimes it pulled away like something alive. For the thing that followed at the end of the rope was the body of a drowned man." Dickens’ sinister story of murder and mystery set in London in the 1860s. - Carefully controlled information, structure and vocabulary - Glossary at the back of the book explains some of the difficult words and phrases - The book has around 2200 basic words for Upper...

'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. They live in a smoky, troubled industrial town so entertainment is hard to come by and resentments run deep. 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...

Pip is born poor, but one day his life suddenly changes. He’s sent to London to learn to become a gentleman. But who’s paying for his education? Who’s paying for his life in London? We follow Pip as he grows up, falls in love and finally knows the truth about himself. On the way, we meet beautiful Estella, Joe Gargery, strange Miss Havisham and mysterious Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is Charles Dickens’ classic story retold here at level A2. In this reader you will ...

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 hard lessons to learn.

The story traces the life of David Copperfield from childhood to maturity. In this Reader you will find: information about Charles Dickens David Copperfield looks back on the first twenty-five years of his life. He is only eight years old when his mother, a young pretty widow, remarries. Unfortunately Mr Murdstone is not a good husband or father. David is sent away to school and only returns home when tragedy strikes. Unloved and unwanted, he is sent to work in a factory. But David is a resour...

Lucie Manette has been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris's most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunited, the Manettes' fortunes become inextricably intertwined with those of two men, the heroic aristocrat Darnay and the dissolute lawyer Carton. Their story, which encompasses violence, revenge, love and redemption, is grippingly played out against the backdrop of the terrifying brutality of the French Revolution.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENNING MANKELLOliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape.In Oliver Twist, Dickens graphically conjures up the capitals underworld, full of prostitutes, thieves, and lost and homeless children, and gives a voice to the disadvantaged and abused.ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE CRUIKSHANK...

Die Erzahlung A Christmas Carol handelt von Ebenezer Scrooge, einem alten missmutigen Mann ohne Freunde. An Heiligabend besuchen ihn drei Geister und entfuhren ihn auf eine erschreckende Reise, die sein eigenes Leben beschreibt. Werden Scrooge die Augen geoffnet? Wird er zu einem besseren Menschen werden?show moreISBN: 9783852720524Nr pagini: 83 pagesFormat: 146 x 211 x 7mm | 160gAnul aparitiei: 01 Sep 2008...

This vivid historical and political novel by Dickens is centred on the infamous 'No Popery' riots, instigated by Lord George Gordon, which terrorised London in 1780. Dickens' targets are prejudice, intolerance, religious bigotry and nationalistic fervour, together with the villains who exploit these for selfish ends.His intense account of the riots is interwoven with the mysterious tale of a long-unsolved murder and with a romance involving forbidden love, treachery and heroism. Barnaby Rudge ab...

Bleak House is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. It is at once a complex mystery story that fully engages the reader in the work of detection, and an unforgettable indictment of an indifferent society. Its representations of a great city's underworld, and of the law's corruption and delay, draw upon the author's personal knowledge and experience.But it is his symbolic art that projects these thi...

With illustrations by Edward Landseer, Daniel Maclise, Clarkson Stanfield, Frank Stone, Richard Doyle, John Leech and John Tenniel, and with a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.In these five long stories, written specifically for Christmas, Dickens combines his concern for social ills with the myths and memories of childhood and traditional seasonal lore.A Christmas Carol, the first of the selection, has become a touchstone of English festive f...

Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly old skinflint. He hates everyone, especially children. But at Christmas three ghosts come to visit him, scare him into mending his ways, and he finds, as he celebrates with Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and their family, that geniality brings its own reward. This finest of all Christmas stories is beautifully illustrated with Arthur Rackham's superb line drawings. An aparitie: 1998Format: 19,8 X 12,9Numar pagini: 96

Interest in supernatural phenomena was high during Charles Dickens' lifetime. He had always loved a good ghost story himself, particularly at Christmas time, and was open-minded, willing to accept, and indeed put to the test, the existence of spirits.His natural inclinations toward drama and the macabre made him a brilliant teller of ghost tales, and in the twenty stories presented here, which include his celebrated A Christmas Carol, the full range of his gothic talents can be seen.Chilling as ...

Mr Dombey is a man obsessed with his firm. His son is groomed from birth to take his place within it, despite his visionary eccentricity and declining health. But Dombey also has a daughter, whose unfailing love for her father goes unreturned. 'Girls' said Mr Dombey, 'have nothing to do with Dombey and Son'.When Walter Gay, a young clerk in her father's office, rescues her from a bewildering experience in the streets of London, his unforgettable friends believe he is well on his way to receiving...

Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted environment. This is the soulless domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the heartless factory owner Josiah Bounderby.However human joy is not excluded thanks to 'Mr Sleary's Horse-Riding' circus, a gin-soaked and hilarious troupe of open-hearted and affectionate people who act as an antidote...

Little Dorrit is a classic tale of imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical, while Dickens' working title for the novel, Nobody's Fault, highlights its concern with personal responsibility in private and public life. Dickens' childhood experiences inform the vivid scenes in Marshalsea debtor's prison, while his adult perceptions of governmental failures shape his satirical picture of the Circumlocution Office. The novel's range of characters -the honest, the crooked, the selfish and the self-...

Martin Chuzzlewit is Charles Dickens' comic masterpiece about which his biographer, Forster, noted that it marked a crucial phase in the author's development as he began to delve deeper into the 'springs of character'.Old Martin Chuzzlewit, tormented by the greed and selfishness of his family, effectively drives his grandson, young Martin, to undertake a voyage to America. It is a voyage which will have crucial consequences not only for young Martin, but also for his grandfather and his grandfat...

Dickens's final novel, left unfinished at his death, is a tale of mystery whose fast-paced action takes place in an ancient cathedral city and in some of the darkest places in nineteenth-century London. Drugs, sexual obsession, colonial adventuring and puzzles about identity are among the novel's themes. At the centre of the plot lie the baffling disappearance of Edwin Drood and the many explanations of his whereabouts. A sombre and menacing atmosphere, a fascinating range of characters and Dick...

Following the success of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby was hailed as a comic triumph and firmly established Dickens as a 'literary gentleman'. It has a full supporting cast of delectable characters that range from the iniquitous Wackford Squeers and his family, to the delightful Mrs Nickleby, taking in the eccentric Crummles and his travelling players, the Mantalinis, the Kenwigs and many more.Combining these with typically Dickensian elements of burlesque and farce, the no...

The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), with its combination of the sentimental, the grotesque and the socially concerned, and its story of pursuit and courage, which sets the downtrodden and the plucky against the malevolent and the villainous, was an immediate popular success.Little Nell quickly became one of Dickens' most celebrated characters, who so captured the imagination of his readers that while the novel was being serialised, many of them wrote to him about her fate.Dickens was conscious of ...