G.K.Chesterton is the best critic of Dickens, and these introductions to his novels his best work. If you are seeking an answer to why Dickens is so enduring, these short essays will answer you. If you are already a Dickensian, these essays are a delightful condensed expression of everything you already know. A pity that it is out of print. It is THE book I try to give to friends who want an introduction to Dickens.

Recently I had to spend a couple of months camping with my 8 year old daughter away from home and mom. We enjoyed reading and even rereading some of the stories from this book containing Ten children from ten different Dickens tales -- including Tiny Tim, David Copperfield, and Oliver Twist. They are featured in a generously illustrated colorful compendium. While the depictions of the children's lives are true to the originals, abridgement may infact encourage the young reader to read the original when they grow up. My daughter could empathise with homeless,motherless Dickensian kids, however she could not understand what is the big deal about Oliver asking for more if he is still hungry ! This tells us how far we have come in terms of feeding our kids well (if not good homes and both parents) since Dickens, at least in the developed countries. In one sentence this book was a nice trailer to the poignant prose of Dickens to be read aloud as well as read by curious children themselves.

Dickens' Christmas Books might be some of his most overlooked works, except for, of course, "A Christmas Carol." But in these stories he has captured the season's spirits of reflection and faith better than any other work I've read. "A Christmas Carol" is an acknowledged masterpiece; "The Chimes" and "The Battle of Life" are particularly moving as well. Four of these five stories bring me to tears by their ends.

I started in 1991 to read one story per year in the published sequence, (for Christmas 2000, I'm reading The Haunted Man again) and this has made December and its holidays more enjoyable and meaningful for me. I hope to continue the cycle and look forward to reading "this year's Christmas story" aloud to my family as my kids grow up.

Oxford Press/World's Classics publishes excellent quality paperbacks, and they do justice here to Dickens' powerful works. I highly recommend this work (and especially this publisher) to anyone; if you're looking for "A Christmas Carol", get this volume of all the Christmas Stories and enjoy even more of Dickens' masterful ability to weave the human condition into such moving short stories.

This is one of the best stories ever written. Ebenezer Scrooge, is the biggest grouch on the world, almost murdering carolers that come to his door for the fact he just can't stand to be Merry, even at Christmas time. The 3 Ghosts (Ghost of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, Christmases to Come) take him to it's own time space, and show him how the Christmas was, and the funeral of Scrooge, only to find that he was unliked and hated, so that no one came to the funeral. This is a truly inspiring story, so I greatly encourage you to get this!

This elegant hardcover book with gold-embossed wreath is agreat gift. Its line-engravings, over 25 of them, make it a classiccollectibles. My family created our own Christmas Carol dinner using the book. Dinners and feasts based on the book are staged nationwide at historic hotels and as a part of Gerald Charles Dickens' American Holiday Tour. The book was written by his mother and father, past president of Dickens world-wide Fellowship.

Now here's an author who does her research. She is also a careful reader of the fiction she analyzes. I can't wait for her to write another book. When it comes out, I will be among the first to buy it.

I was never a huge fan of yesterday's classics. Sometimes they come off boring to me; who knows, maybe I don't have the intellectual ability or patience to read anything published before 1920. But after reading this collection from front to back I truley understood why Charles Dickens is considered by some to be a literary genius. Scary, Witty, Clownish, Entertaining. You can't go wrong, especially with characters like CAPTAIN MURDERER, who has kept fresh within my imagintation over handfuls of years and piles of novels, as one of the most devious fiends.

So why did I begin David Copperfield? Well I didn't want to do homework and I thought it would be nice to say that I had read a great work of literature. Why did I finish David Copperfield? Because it was one of most intrigueing books I have ever read (and by this point I really NEEDED to do that homework too!) Each character was deep and complex, not a flat one in the book! I enjoyed the way an event here or there would remind me of my own life (being close to the same age of Mr. Copperfield) and how I felt as if I actually knew all of the people he delt with. I will admit that the going is slow plot wise, but the characters! ohhh the characters! If you have enjoyed Jane Eyre or Cider House Rules, I would strongly recomend this as well. I would recomend this anyway, but if you liked those!

Suchoff bases his far-ranging analysis of three major novelists of modernity - Dickens, Melville, and Kafka - on the stimulating intellectual frame inspired by the now classic Frankfurt School theorists - Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin - and by their interpretation of history, which goes back to the first half of the twentieth century. Against the anti-historical reading of culture, the Frankfurt School claimed that artefacts contained the traces of their dialectical links with their times and that art worked against the grain of hegemonic representations, thus carrying out an essentially redemptive role in the domain of culture. According to Suchoff, this approach can still offer innovative and meaningful interpretations of the modern novel, capable of highlighting the oppositional role played by mass culture in and through texts, in the face of what he regards as reductive and conservative readings of modernism. Starting with Victorianism, Suchoff then discusses how the commodification of the novelist does not suppress Dickens's subversive rewriting of Victorian stereotypes. He concentrates on "Little Dorrit" to retrace in the subtext of this emblematic and most decent novel a repressed narrative of sexual abuse and unspeakable violence against women, a narrative that is nevertheless voiced by eloquent textual clues. Melville's work is interpreted as a powerful and devastating revision of American myths of power, destined to shipwreck like Ahab's ship, the Pequod. Finally, Kafka is analysed as a writer who thoughtfully comes to terms with Jewish identity, Zionism and political action, against the interpretative cliché that would deny his involvement with the challenges of his times. Suchoff's analysis manages to combine both sound theoretical knowledge and clever textual analysis, capturing the making and remaking of ideology in the discursive layers of the literary artefact. Doubtless, his convincing interpretation of these three major writers, who are so diversely engaged with history, makes his book not just an interesting contribution to the large corpus of criticism on Dickens, Melville and Kafka in the widening field of cultural studies, but a stimulus to apply such critical tools to other texts.

Read with aplomb by Paul Scofield, this classic Dickens novel is a great audio tape to take along with you when you are walking or exercising. David Copperfield seems somewhat of a pitiful fellow, which makes you like him all the more, and the villainous character of Mr. Uriah Heep is brought out quite nicely. What struck me was how people in this book fell in love so quickly, as though looking at one another and sensing an attraction was enough for a proposal of marriage. Young Mr. Copperfield loses his father at a very early age, but is quite content with his housemaid and his mother, who love him dearly. Then he is sent for a two week visit to the home of his housemaid, where he has a marvelous time, only to return and learn that his mother has re-married a dreadful man, who beats David and sends him away to the worst of schools, where, if he is not careful, he will be beaten daily. When his mother passes away, young David begins to become a man, and it is this that you will admire, his strength and perseverance in growing up under such adverse circumstances. The cassette version is only two cassettes long, but it is long enough for you to understand precisely what Mr. Dickens means for you to understand. And yes, David Copperfield suffers many trials and tribulations as an adult as well, which keeps it interesting. What he becomes in the end will not surprise you, but it will delight you.