Akron Public Library

On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with almost everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations. While artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures...

Wilkie Collins is looking forward to spending Christmas at Gads Hill, Charles Dickens' Kentish country home, but the festivities are cut short when a body is found on the marshland. Timmy O'Connor was invited to the gathering with his four nephews after a chance encounter with Dickens, but is now dead. Who was this unpleasant stranger?

"August, 1856. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens are spending the summer at Knebworth House, the magnificent Hertfordshire home of fellow writer Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, where they are putting on a charity performance of one of Lord Edward's most successful plays, The Lady of Lyon. But the dress rehearsal is disrupted by the discovery of a body lying in the centre of the stage, shot to death. With everyone involved in the play coming under suspicion,...

"From the critically acclaimed author of The Invention of Murder, an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets of Dickens' London.The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact Regency town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever seen. Technology--railways, street-lighting,...

In 1842, eleven-year-old twins, whose father runs a boat on the Juniata Canal in Pennsylvania, learn of a Harrisburg bookseller's plan to steal Charles Dickens's newly finished novel while Dickens himself is touring the U.S.

A guide to Dickens's life, works, characters, the Victorian context in which he lived and wrote, and the critics and scholars who have commented on his novels.