Penguin English library

"Charles Dickens's first historical novel-set during the anti-Catholic riots of 1780-is an unparalleled portrayal of the terror of a rampaging mob, seen through the eyes of the individuals swept up in the chaos. Those individuals include Emma, a Catholic, and Edward, a Protestant, whose forbidden love weaves through the heart of the story; and the simpleminded Barnaby, one of the riot leaders, whose fate is tied to a mysterious murder and whose beloved...

Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902) was a Victorian novelist who wrote in many genres. The Way of All Flesh and Erewhon are his most famous novels. Besides fiction Butler also wrote on evolution, Christian orthodoxy, Italian art, literary history and translated the Illiad and The Odyssey. Erewhon is a utopian satire of Victorian England published in 1872. The title is the name of a fictional country and it is also the word nowhere spelled backwards. The beginning...

These three short works show Jane Austen experimenting with a variety of different literary stayles, from melodrama to satire, and exploring a range of social classes and settings.

"The work of a young novelist at the height of his powers, "Nicholas Nickleby" is one of the touchstones of the English comic novel. Around the central story of Nicholas Nickleby and the misfortunes of his family, Dickens created some of his most wonderful characters: the muddle-headed Mrs Nickleby, the gloriously theatrical Crummles, their protege Miss Petowker, the pretentious Mantalinis and the mindlessly cruel Squeers and his wife. "Nicholas Nickleby"'s...

"Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Dickens had already achieved renown with The Pickwick Papers. With Oliver Twist his reputation was enhanced and strengthened. The novel contains many classic Dickensian themes - grinding poverty, desperation, fear, temptation and the eventual triumph of good in the face of great adversity. Oliver Twist features some of the author's most enduring characters, such as Oliver himself (who dares to ask for more), the tyrannical...

In a series of letters to her parents, 15-year-old Pamela Andrews recounts her tribulations as a servant in the house of Mr. B. The infatuated master's repeated attempts at seduction―foiled again and again by the quick-witted maid―lead to Pamela's abduction and imprisonment in a remote country house, where the unlikely couple truly come to know one another. Samuel Richardson, one of England's early novelists, published Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded...

The American humorist's classic novel depicting human nature under slavery. At the beginning of Pudd'nhead Wilson a young slave woman, fearing for her infant son's life, exchanges her light skinned child with her master's. From this rather simple premise Mark Twain fashioned one of his most entertaining, funny, yet biting novels. On its surface, Pudd'nhead Wilson possesses all the elements of an engrossing nineteenth century mystery, reversed identities,...

Written in the last months of Austen's life, Sanditon features a glorious cast of hypochondriacs and speculators in a newly established seaside resort, and shows the author contemplating a changing society with scepticism and amusement. It tells the story of Charlotte Heywood, who is transported by a chance accident from her rural hometown to Sanditon, where she is exposed to the intrigues and dalliances of a small town - and encounters the intriguingly...

Following the dramatic romance of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte intended Shirley to be a 'salutary' change. Set in Yorkshire during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, the novel articulates the social realities of economic hardship, the Luddite riots, dissatisfaction with the government and an inadequate Church. In the foreground of these concerns, a mill-owner, Robert Moore, in pursuit of financial security, ignores the suffering of his workers to such...

"Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his wife Susan and baby daughter. Eighteen years later Susan and her daughter seek him out, only to discover that he has become the most prominent man in Casterbridge. Henchard attempts to make amends for his youthful misdeeds but his unchanged impulsiveness clouds his relationships in love as well as his fortunes in business. Although Henchard is...