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Adventures & Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
With an Introduction by Dr. Julian Wolfreys. ‘My name is Sherlock Holmes. it is my business to know what other people don’t know’. ’The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes first introduced Arthur Conan Doyle’s brilliant detective the readers of The Strand Magazine. In these twenty three tales, collected here in one volume, you have some of… Read More
Tale of Two Cities
With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Merchant, Principal Lecturer in English, Canterbury Christ Church University College. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz). A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens’ greatest historical novel, traces the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror. Dickens… Read More
Martin Chuzzlewit
With an Introduction and Notes by Dr John Bowen, Department of English, University of Keele. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz). Martin Chuzzlewit is Charles Dickens’ comic masterpiece about which his biographer, Forster, noted that it marked a crucial phase in the author’s development as he began to delve deeper into the ‘springs of character’…. Read More
Great Expectations
With an Introduction and Notes by Dr John Bowen, Keele University. Illustrations by F.W. Pailthrope. Considered by many to be Dickens’ finest novel, Great Expectations traces the growth of the book’s narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From its famous dramatic opening on the… Read More
Complete Father Brown Stories
With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies. Father Brown, one of the most quirkily genial and lovable characters to emerge from English detective fiction, first made his appearance in The Innocence of Father Brown in 1911. That first collection of stories established G.K. Chesterton’s kindly cleric in the front rank of eccentric sleuths. This complete… Read More
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
With an Introduction and Notes by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury. This selection of Carroll’s works includes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, both containing the famous illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. No greater books for children have ever been written. The simple language, dreamlike… Read More
Sense and Sensibility
Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco University. ‘Young women who have no economic or political power must attend to the serious business of contriving material security’. Jane Austen’s sardonic humour lays bare the stratagems, the hypocrisy and the poignancy inherent in the struggle of two very different sisters to achieve respectability. Sense… Read More
Pride and Prejudice
Introduction and Notes by Dr Ian Littlewood, University of Sussex. Pride and Prejudice, which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners. In it the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only one aim – that of finding a good match for each of her five… Read More
Persuasion
Introduction and Notes by Elaine Jordan, Reader in Literature, University of Essex. What does persuasion mean – a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen’s quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time… Read More