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It is widely known that Charles Dickens gave public readings of his works, and that those readings were enormously popular. Far less well known are the stories themselves; these were not, as is the modern fashion, taken verbatim from the published novels. Instead, Dickens trimmed, reworded, and re-shaped material from the novels to create stories…

This modified eBook is intended for readers outside of the United States and Canada. If you are within the United States or Canada, please see the print and eBook options available on this page. For copyright reasons, some readings are omitted from this modified eBook. However, it includes 88% of the material available in the…

This is a special Trade eBook edition of Kirsten Lodge’s acclaimed translation of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories. A separate teaching edition of these translations—with contextualizing appendices, extensive annotations, and an introduction—is also available in both print and eBook formats. This is a special Trade eBook edition of Kirsten Lodge’s…

Originally published in serial form from December 1860 to August 1861, Great Expectations is the ‘autobiography’ of Pip, as he transformed from apprentice village blacksmith to a London gentleman. Unlike many of Dickens’s earlier works, the novel is not so much a protest against social evils as a sustained meditation upon the process of social…

Emerging from Dickens’s preoccupation in the early 1840s with issues of poverty, ignorance, and cruelty, this classic story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, visited by four ghosts on Christmas Eve, was first published in 1843 to strong reviews and popular success. The Broadview edition uses the first edition with original drawings by John Leech. This edition also…

The labyrinthine, ingenious plot of Bleak House focuses on the seemingly endless lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an inheritance dispute that has been moving through the courts for years. Dozens of characters, including the innocent young narrator Esther Summerson, her friends Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, and the jaded aristocrats Sir Leicester and Lady Honoria Dedlock,…

In all six of its volumes, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature presents British literature in a truly distinctive light. Fully grounded in sound literary and historical scholarship, the anthology takes a fresh approach to many canonical authors, and includes a wide selection of work by lesser-known writers. The anthology also provides wide-ranging coverage of…

In a preface to this novel, Dickens described David Copperfield as his “favorite child,” and the story has remained among the favorites of Dickens’ readers, too, with the characters of Betsy Trotwood, Mr. Pegotty, Uriah Heep, and Wilkins Micawber as well as David himself becoming part of the fabric of Western culture. This facsimile reprint…

Despite the title, Dickens’s portrayal of early industrial society here is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love, of Sissy the circus girl with love to…

The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories beautifully demonstrates the astonishing variety and ingenuity of Victorian short stories. This collection brings together works focused on a wide range of popular Victorian subjects in many different styles and forms (including comic, gothic, fantasy, adventure, and colonial works; science fiction; children’s tales; New Woman writing; Irish yarns;…

Mary Barton first appeared in 1848, and has since become one of the best known novels on the ‘condition of England,’ part of a nineteenth-century British trend to understand the enormous cultural, economic and social changes wrought by industrialization. Gaskell’s work had great importance to the labour and reform movements, and it influenced writers such…

A Marriage Below Zero is the first novel in English to explicitly explore the subject of male homosexuality. Written by a British émigré to America, the New York theater critic Alfred J. Cohen, under the pseudonym of “Alan Dale,” this first-person narrative is told by a young Englishwoman, Elsie Bouverie, who gradually discovers that her…

The Victorian era witnessed dramatic transformations in print culture, and this new anthology covers the exciting intellectual and social debates of the period. From first-person accounts of the lives of factory workers to Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic theory, and from narratives of British travelers in Africa and Asia to Havelock Ellis’s theories of “sexual inversion,” the…

The texts in this unique collection range from the Gothic Revival of the late eighteenth century through to the late Victorian gothic, and from the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge to the short fiction of H.G. Wells and Henry James. Genres represented include medievalist poetry, psychological thrillers, dark political dystopias, sinister tales of social corruption,…

Charles Dickens’s famous second novel recounts the story of a boy born in the workhouse and raised in an infant farm as he tries to make his way in the world. Intended to raise feeling against the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 (which had emphasized the workhouse as an appropriate means of dealing with…

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems are among the most haunting and indelible in American literature, but critics for decades persisted in seeing Poe as an anomaly, or even an anachronism. His works, with their bizarrely motivated characters and mysterious settings, did not seem to be a part of the literature of early nineteenth-century America.…

Elizabeth Gaskell’s episodic second novel, sometimes dismissed as nostalgically “charming,” is now considered by many critics to be her most sophisticated work. The country town of Cranford is home to a group of women, affectionately called “Amazons” by the narrator, whose seemingly uneventful lives are full of conflicts, failures, and unexpected connections. A rich commentary…

European Racism collects more than 130 primary sources—from religious tracts, legal codes, and government edicts, to novel excerpts, paintings, illustrations, and songs—to help readers trace the development and spread of racism in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day. The volume is organized into six sections revealing how Europeans developed racist attitudes toward…

Judiciously selected from the full Broadview Anthology of British Literature, this Compact Edition distills the full sweep of British literature into a single volume. The most essential works and writers are represented—from Beowulf to Zadie Smith—with enough breadth to offer instructors flexibility without overwhelming students. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature is acclaimed for its…