Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and died in 1870. As a boy he had to leave school and work in a factory while his father was in prison for debt, and that experience shaped for good the way he saw poverty and injustice.
Almost all his novels came out in instalments, and readers waited for each one impatiently. Bleak House, from 1853, revolves around an endless lawsuit that ruins everyone who comes near it, and mixes satire, mystery and a vast gallery of characters. Our Mutual Friend, from 1865, opens with a body in the Thames and an inheritance that complicates everything. The Mystery of Edwin Drood was left unfinished: Dickens died in 1870 while writing it, and no one knows how he meant to solve it.
His books are long, generous and very funny, full of names and faces impossible to forget.
Their books in our catalogue
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The Mystery of Edwin DroodCharles Dickens
The Mystery of Edwin DroodCharles Dickens
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Charles Dickens
In Cloisterham, a cathedral town of mist and bells, young Edwin Drood has been promised since childhood to Rosa Bud, while his uncle Jasper, the choirmaster, keeps a hidden life among London's opium dens. The arrival of twins from Ceylon stirs jealousy and suspicion. Dickens's final, unfinished novel is a brooding puzzle that leaves every reader to play detective.
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Bleak HouseCharles Dickens
Bleak HouseCharles Dickens
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
An endless inheritance suit in the Court of Chancery binds together wards, aristocrats, sinister lawyers and a street-sweeping boy in a fog-bound London. Partly told by young Esther Summerson, whose parentage is a mystery, Dickens blends biting satire, comedy and suspense, with one of fiction's early detectives on the case. A vast, immersive novel to live inside for weeks.
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Our Mutual FriendCharles Dickens
Our Mutual FriendCharles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend
Charles Dickens
A body pulled from the Thames reroutes a fortune and sets all of London in motion, from river scavengers to the drawing rooms of the newly rich. Dickens's last completed novel is a sharp satire on money and what it makes of people, crowded with vivid, grotesque and lovable characters. A broad, patient read that pays back with humour, tenderness and a mature, darker view of Victorian society.
