Search Results: Authors starting with D from Fay Tsapoga

Great Expectations opens unforgettably in a twilit and overgrown churchyard on the eerie Kent marshes.
There the orphan Pip is disturbed to meet an escaped convict, Magwitch, but gives him food, in an encounter that is to haunt both their lives. How Pip receives riches from a mysterious benefactor, snobbishly abandons his friends for London society and "great expectations", and grows through misfortune and suffering to maturity is the theme of one of Dickens's best-loved novels.
In Great Expectations Dickens blends gripping drama with penetrating satire to give a compelling story rich in comedy and pathos: he has also created two of his finest, most haunting characters in Pip and Miss Havisham.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
Those are the famous lines of Dickens's stirring tale of two cities, London and Paris, at the time of the French Revolution. Suspense gathers from the opening scene, the dramatic coach journey to Dover and the rescue of Dr. Manette from incarceration in the Bastille. At the centre of the novel are the figures of Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, both men in love with the doctor's beautiful daughter Lucie, linked together by fate and by the engulfing terrors of revolution.
A Tale of Two Cities was written at a time of crisis in Dickens's life. It is a wonderful love story and, aside from The Pickwick Papers, the most popular of all Dickens's novels.

Dickens's most wide-ranging and symbolic novel, Bleak House is set in the world of Chancery and focuses in particular on the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
The case, which was originally brought to settle a dispute over a will, has been running at court for generations and has used up a great deal of health and wealth in its course. Richard Carstone and Ada Clare have been made wards of court and live with John Jarndyce at Bleak house while they await the verdict. During that time they marry, always expecting their fortunes to improve...
Also living at Bleak House is Esther Summerson, a young woman of unknown origins. Tulkinghorn, the cunning lawyer of Sir Leicester Dedlock, has his suspicions as to her true parentage, however, and only death can stop him from making them known.
With its humour and pathos, its brilliant satire and its depiction of the Victorian world in microcosm, Bleak House is considered to be one of Dickens's finest achievements.

Written in the form of an autobiography, it tells the story of David Copperfield, growing to maturity in the affairs of the world and the affairs of the heart - his success as an artist arising out of his sufferings and out of the lessons he derives from life. In addition, in David Copperfield Dickens creates some of his most memorable characters - Micawber, Uriah Heep, Steerforth - creatures whom, in Chesterton's words, "we would not forget if we could, creatures whom we could not forget if we would, creatures who are more actual than the man who made them".

Nicholas Nickleby is Charles Dickens's third novel and brilliantly combines his exuberant comic gifts with his crusading social conscience.
Nicholas is a young man of "impetuous temper and little or no experience" who saves his family from dire misfortune at the hands of his villainous uncle, Ralph. And all around him is a great gallery if Dickensian types, who range from the farcical - the Mantalinis, the Lillyvicks and the Crummles family of travelling actors - the pathetic - Smike, the maltreated schoolboy - to the downright wicked - Sir Mulberry Hawk and Wackford Squeers, the infamous headmaster of Dotheboys Hall.
Mixing comedy and horror, melodrama and acid satire, Dickens depicts a world in which the exploitation and abuse of youth and innocence cannot ever fully vanquish kindness, affection and the joyful energies of life.