As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, the destitute little crossing-sweeper.
Discovery School - Great Books - Great Expectations
Like Dickens' other stories, Great Expectations is published as a serial and is an instant hit. Authors, actors, and scholars discuss the many interpretations of Miss Havisham and Pip's desire to become a gentleman. A tour of real-life settings Dickens used in his novels and examples of how Pip's obsession with Estella and changed relationship with Joe reflect the author's life and the British class system at the time.
Robert Lindsay leads a cast which includes Alison Steadman, Jonathan Coy, Andrew Scott, Paul Ready and Karl Johnson in a new dramatisation of Charles Dickens's classic, with original music by Lennert Busch.
From the echo of the first line 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times' to the final 'It is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done', Dickens's novel of the French revolution tells a story of the redemptive powers of love in the face of cruelty, violence and neglect.
After Shakespeare, Charles Dickens is the writer in English whose effect on the world’s readers transcends the apparent limits of literature and so teaches us that imaginative invention itself can be a form of life. Together with The Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol seems as though it has always been there, just as Hamlet and Falstaff give us the strong illusion they did not require Shakespeare’s art to have awarded them life.
For much of the century, London's greatest contemporary observer, Charles Dickens, obsessively walked its streets, recording its pleasures and vices, curiosities and cruelties. In his company, the author leads us through the markets, sewers, rivers, slums, cemeteries, gin palaces and chop-houses of the Victorian capital, revealing the city in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. From the cacophonous cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, from the many uses of a dead horse to the unimaginably grueling working lives of hawker children, no detail is too small, or too strange. No one who reads this book will view London in the same light again.
