'Among the most powerful things Dickens ever did in fiction' Guardian

Greed has led wealthy old Martin Chuzzlewit to become...

'One of my life's greatest tragedies is to have already read Pickwick Papers - I can't go back and read it for the first time'...

Matthew Lewis's Gothic masterpiece, depicting a holy man slowly becoming entangled in a web of sin, The Monk is edited with an...

Composed in medieval Iceland, Hrolf's Saga is one of the greatest of all mythic-legendary sagas, relating half-fantastical events...

'The noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers ... ethically he is supreme' Bertrand Russell

Published shortly after...

When young Francis Osbaldistone discovers that his vicious and scheming cousin Rashleigh has designs both on his father's...

When Elfrise Swanston meets Stephen Smith she is attracted to his handsome face, gentle bearing and the sense of mystery which...

One of the key works in the nineteenth-century battle between science and Scripture, Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology...

Hardy described Desperate Remedies as a tale of 'mystery, entanglement, surprise and moral obliquity'.

Cytherea has taken a...

Thomas Hardy's tragic vision of a love struggling to overcome prejudice and rejection, The Return of the Native is edited in...

'A revelation ... as well as being sympathetic to the plight of children, it is hilarious' A. N. Wilson

The hero of Dickens's...

The daughter of a wealthy railway magnate, Paula Power inherits De Stancy Castle, an ancient castle in need of modernization. She...

'Ambiguities indeed! One long brain-muddling, soul-bewildering ambiguity (to borrow Mr. Melville's style), like Melchisedeck,...

Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters is a story of romance, scandal and intrigue within the confines of a watchful, gossiping...

'When Dickens has described something you see it for the rest of your life' George Orwell

In 1844, Charles Dickens took a...

Ruth Hilton is an orphaned young seamstress who catches the eye of a gentleman, Henry Bellingham, who is captivated by her...

As Daniel Deronda opens, Gwendolen Harleth is poised at the roulette-table, prepared to throw away her family fortune. She is...

Elizabeth Gaskell's only historical novel, Sylvia's Lovers, is set in 1790 in the seaside town of Monkshaven (Whitby) where...

The Moonstone is one of the first true works of detective fiction, in which Wilkie Collins established the groundwork for the...

Anthony Trollope's story of one man's obsessive self-deception pitted against against the enduring power of his wife's love, He...

Shamela is a brilliant parody of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, in which a virtuous servant girl long resists her master's advances...

'Sets out the London of the 1830s before you, streets, people, pleasures, low life, prisons' Claire Tomalin

Charles Dickens's...

Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium and former Prime Minister of England, is widowed and wracked by grief. Struggling to...

Son of a bankrupt landowner, Frank Gresham is intent on marrying his beloved Mary Thorne, despite her illegitimacy and apparent...

Daniel Defoe's bawdy tale of a woman's struggle for independence and redemption, Moll Flanders is edited with an introduction and...

The hero of Charlotte Bronte's first novel escapes a dreary clerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher in...

Making her debut in London society, Nanda Brookenham is being groomed for the marriage market. Thrust suddenly into the...

Mill John... , Bentham...

One of the most important nineteenth-century schools of thought, Utilitarianism propounds the view that the value or rightness of...

Anthony Trollope's The Warden is the first of his well-loved Chronicles of Barsetshire, edited with an introduction and notes by...

Mark Robarts is a clergyman with ambitions beyond his small country parish of Framley. In a naive attempt to mix in influential...