In the 1840s, Charles Dickens wrote 5 short stories with strong social and moral messages. The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home, is the third of these stories. Following the home life of John Peerybingle, the story introduces the many people in John's family and life along with a cricket that acts as the guardian angel of the family. Like its predecessors, this story also contains heavy social and moral implications. However, it differs...

Steeped in eroticism, this novel captures the dilemma of lovers who look for complete fulfillment in one another and reflects the post-World War I era's despair at an increasingly mechanized, inhumane society.

"In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break away from her controlling family--a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of twentieth-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, with a subversive genius that anticipates the fantastic flights...

Adam Kindred is in London for a job interview and looking at a bright future. Then he has a chance meeting in a restaurant that results in a series of actions that cost him his family, his money, his very identity. Utterly alone, Adam joins London's underground society of dispossessed and tries to figure out what happened to his life.

Will new love conquer old grudges? Since her father died, Deborah Jannvier has been living under the provision of her callous uncle. So when a handsome stranger named Matthew Pascoe appears bearing a summons from a long-lost wealthy relative, Deborah agrees to return to Marymoor House with Matthew. On arrival, Deborah is told she shall inherit the estate on one condition: that she immediately marry Matthew. With no hope of a future otherwise, Deborah...

Moving from the industrial riots of discontented millworkers through to the unsought passions of a middle-class woman, and from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny, it poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Through the story of Margaret Hale, the middle-class southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell skilfully explores issues of class and gender in the...

While inebriated, Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a sailor. When he realizes the horror of what he has done, he vows to change his life through hard work and fierce ambition, but his past and his guilt still haunt him.

"George Eliot's beloved masterpiece in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with a foreword by Rebecca Mead, author of the bestselling memoir My Life in Middlemarch A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot's Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. The proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against...

In this fresh approach to the history of the Black Death, John Hatcher, a world-renowned scholar of the Middle Ages, recreates everyday life in a mid-fourteenth century rural English village. By focusing on the experiences of ordinary villagers as they lived, and died, during the Black Death (1345-50 AD), Hatcher vividly places the reader directly into those tumultuous years and describes in fascinating detail the day-to-day existence of people struggling...

The town is a powder keg ready to explode ... All it needs is a match. England, 1320. The threat of civil war lies heavily on the kingdom. The monk Ralph of Houndeslow is new to Crediton's leper hospital. He finds that not only are his charges appallingly ill, but bigotry means that they are all shunned by the people of the town. The citizens of Crediton are appalled when the goldsmith is found murdered, and his daughter assaulted. Sir Baldwin Furnshill...