19th‑Century Classics

Introduction and Notes by Dr T.C.B. Cook Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).Following the success of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby was hailed as a comic triumph and firmly established Dickens as a 'lite…

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Claire Seymour, University of Kent at Canterbury. The Turn of the Screw is the classic ghost story for which James is most remembered. Set in a country house, it is a chilling tale of the super…

This powerful novel, Tolstoy's third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being based on a real-life event. Dmitri Nek…

The tale of Heathcliff and Cathy's ungovernable love and suffering, and the havoc that their passion wreaks on the families of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, shocked the book's first readers, with even Emily's sister Charlotte won…

Sense and Sensibility is the story of the two Dashwood sisters, who embody the conflict between the oppressive nature of "civilized" society and the human desire for romantic passion. Elinor is cautious and unassuming about sentim…

When the young Ishmael gets on board Captain Ahab's whaling ship, little does he suspect that the mission on which he is about to embark is the fulfilment of his master's obsessive desire for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale wh…

When the reporter Edward Malone is sent to interview the formidable Professor Challenger about his accounts of strange prehistoric beasts on a remote plateau in South America, he expects to be given short shrift by the researcher,…

On a boat in the Thames estuary, Marlow tells his travelling companions of his reconnaissance expedition for a Belgian trading company to its most remote outpost in central Africa, which brought him on the trail of the elusive Kur…

After spending several years in a sanatorium recovering from an illness that caused him to lose his memory and ability to reason, Prince Myshkin arrives in St Petersburg and is at once confronted with the stark realities of life i…

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 t…

Introduction and Notes by Dr David Rogers, Kingston University. 'There he lay looking as if youth had been half-renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey, the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin s…

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Tim Middleton, Head of English Studies, University of Ripon and York. In seeking to discover his inner self, the brilliant Dr Jekyll discovers a monster. First published to critical acclaim in …

With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Roger Cardinal. University of Kent at Canterbury. Translationsare by Paul Desages (Around the World in Eighty Days) and Arthur Chambers (Five Weeks in a Balloon).JULES VERNE (1828-1905) …

Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party?'So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land in June 1867. His adventures produced The Innocents Abroad, …

With an Introduction and Notes by Stuart Hutchinson. Following on from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884-5) Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) became one of Mark Twain's most popular books. Again w…

With an Introduction and Notes by Stuart Hutchinson, University of Kent at Canterbury. Tom Sawyer, a shrewd and adventurous boy, is as much at home in the respectable world of his Aunt Polly as in the self-reliant and parentless w…

Introduction and Notes by Janet Beer, Manchester Metropolitan University. The House of Mirth tells the story of Lily Bart, aged 29, beautiful, impoverished and in need of a rich husband to safeguard her place in the social elite, …

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Andrew Frayn, Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University.In these two compelling novels H.G. Wells imagines terrifying futures in which civilisation its…

With an Introduction and Notes by Linda Dryden, Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh Napier University and the author of Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells: The Fin-de Siecle-Literary Scene. At the end of the nineteenth century…

With an Introduction by Alex Dolby. Translation by W.H.G. Kingston.Jules Verne (1828-1905) is internationally famous as the author of a distinctive series of adventure stories describing new travel technologies which opened up the…

With an Introduction and Notes by John M.L. Drew, University of Buckingham. Wilde's only novel, first published in 1890, is a brilliantly designed puzzle, intended to tease conventional minds with its exploration of the myriad int…

With an Introduction and Notes by Anne Varty, Royal Holloway, University of London. De Profundis is Wilde's eloquent and bitter reproach from prison to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. He contrasts his behaviour with that of his cl…

With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Emeritus John Chapple, University of Hull. The sheer variety and accomplishment of Elizabeth Gaskell's shorter fiction is amazing. This new volume contains six of her finest stories that…

With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren, University of Kent at Canterbury. Translation by James Carroll Beckwirth (1899). Set in 1482, Victor Hugo's powerful novel of 'imagination, caprice and fantasy' is a meditation on love…

With an Introduction and Notes by Roger Clark, University of Kent at Canterbury. Translation by Charles E. Wilbour (1862).One of the great Classics of Western Literature, Les Miserables is a magisterial work which is rich in both …

With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. A Pair of Blue Eyes, though early in the sequence of Hardy's novels, is lively and gripping. Its dramatic cliff-hanging episode, for exa…

With an Introduction and Notes by Claire Seymour, University of Kent at Canterbury. The Return of the Native is widely recognised as the most representative of Hardy's Wessex novels. He evokes the dismal presence and menacing beau…

Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury. This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th-centu…

With a new Introduction by Professor Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D. This selection of a hundred of O. Henry's succinct tales displays the range, humour and humanity of a perennially popular short-story writer.Here Henry gives a richly …

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel depicts nothing less than the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-nineteenth century. But these clashes are dramatized…