A much-anthologized story that first appeared in Mugby Junction, the extra Christmas number for Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round in 1866. It later appeared in a one-volume edition of all the Christmas numbers from All the Year Round… Read More ›
First published in the New York Ledger in three parts in 1859, this story is one of the few by Charles Dickens that is widely regarded as Detective Fiction. It is narrated by Mr. Sampson, the retired chief manager of… Read More ›
Sketches by “Boz” Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People is a collection of Charles Dickens’s first-published works. He had begun his literary publishing career proper on December 1, 1833 (at age 21), when “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” (later… Read More ›
One of two short stories by Charles Dickens that appeared in the Christmas number of Household Words in 1852, A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. The story was later published by Chapman and Hall in Christmas Stories (1859),… Read More ›
The first of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Books, A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas is a fairy-tale-like ghost story that has contributed much to the formation of the Christmas story as a genre. Written in October… Read More ›
Originally slated to appear in 1847, “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain,” the fifth and last instalment of the Christmas book series was delayed because of Charles Dickens’s exhaustion at maintaining the serialization of Dombey and Son (1846–48). In… Read More ›
Dickens’s 10th novel, serialized weekly in Household Words (April 1–August 12, 1854), unillustrated. Published in one volume by Bradbury & Evans, 1854. This controversial book, the shortest of Dickens’s novels, takes up the issues of industrialism and education and offers… Read More ›
Dickens’s ninth novel, published in monthly parts in 1852–53, with illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne, issued in one volume in 1853. Often characterized as the first of the late novels, Bleak House describes England as a bleak house, devastated by… Read More ›
Dickens’s 13th novel, published in 36 weekly parts in All the Year Round (December 1, 1860–August 3, 1861), unillustrated. Published in three volumes by Chapman & Hall, 1861. A Bildungsroman narrated in the first person by its hero, Great Expectations… Read More ›
Round the Sofa, a two-volume collection of stories, short novels, and essays by Elizabeth Gaskell, was made up of earlier works published previously in magazines, notably Charles Dickens’s Household Words and, in America, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The disparate… Read More ›
The first of Margaret Oliphant’s popular series Stories of the Seen and Unseen, “A Beleaguered City” belongs to the subgenre of Victorian-era supernatural tales, such as Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol . In “A Beleaguered City” Oliphant uses different narrators… Read More ›
“The Stolen Letter” was originally published as “The Fourth Poor Traveller” in The Seven Poor Travellers, the extra Christmas number of Charles Dickens’s Household Words (December 1854). At this time, Wilkie Collins was a protégé of Dickens. The story was… Read More ›
The “Dickens World,” as Humphrey House calls it, is one of sharp moral contrast, a world in which the selfseeking— imprisoned in their egotism—rub shoulders with the altruistic, freed from the demands of self by concern for others; a world… Read More ›
Elizabeth Gaskell’s story “Lois the Witch” was first published in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round in October 1859. Set during the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials of 1692, the story offers a fi ctionalized chronicle of Lois Barclay, a… Read More ›
Serialized in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round (January–February 1863), Elizabeth Gaskell’s A Dark Night’s Work details the devastating effects of a tragic secret shared by Edward Wilkins, a widowed lawyer in the rural town of Hamley, his daughter… Read More ›
First published in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words (July 19 and 26, 1856), the story was included in Wilkie Collins’s short story collection The Queen of Hearts (1859) as “Brother Owen’s Story of Anne Rodway.” The narrative is composed of… Read More ›
For many, perhaps most, Victorian readers, fiction was packaged within the pages of a magazine or newspaper rather than between the covers of a book. During the 1830s and 1850s the reduction and eventual abolition of the notorious stamp duty… Read More ›
The third novel by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) returns to themes earlier explored in his semiautobiographical first novel, Confessions of a Mask. The title, a euphemism for homosexuality roughly equivalent to “forbidden love,” frankly announces the novel’s subject matter… Read More ›
“Sir Edmund Orme” is one of Henry James’s many tales that revolve around strange apparitions. A fascination with occult (magical, theosophical, mysterious, or even spiritual) phenomena is evident in many of James’s tales and short stories. Like his contemporaries George… Read More ›
This story was first published in the extra Christmas number of Household Words (edited by Charles Dickens) and was republished in Elizabeth Gaskell’s collection Right at Last and Other Tales (1860). It tells the story of Alice Openshaw, who moves… Read More ›
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