Charles Dickens

“A boy born in a workhouse asks for more, runs away to London, and falls among thieves, where the gentle Oliver becomes the prize in a struggle between Fagin's gang, the brutal Bill Sikes, the doomed Nancy, and the few good people who mean to save him.”

“On Christmas Eve, the miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead partner and three Spirits, who show him his past, his present and his future.”

“David Copperfield tells his own life: a happy infancy ended by a cruel stepfather, child labour in a London warehouse, flight to an eccentric aunt, school, love, work as a writer — and the friends and enemies, Micawber, Steerforth, Uriah Heep, Peggotty and Agnes, who shape him.”

“While the endless Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce devours a fortune and the lives of its hopeful heirs, an orphan girl, Esther Summerson, comes to live at Bleak House — and a cold, proud lady of fashion, a dead law-copyist and a sharp-eyed lawyer lead toward the secret of Esther's birth.”

“A doctor freed after eighteen years in the Bastille, his devoted daughter, the French aristocrat who renounces his family name to marry her, and the dissolute English lawyer who loves her in silence are drawn from London into the Paris of the Terror.”

“An orphan boy from the Kentish marshes is suddenly made a gentleman by a secret benefactor, and learns too late who it is, and what he has lost.”