Books published by publisher Wordsworth Editions Ltd.

This novel, written when Dickens was only 25 years old, immediately brought him immense popularity. Presenting a host of now-classic characters in a series of adventures, it displays the richness of his skills of characterization and description.Mr Samuel Pickwick is general chairman of the Pickwick Club, whose members - Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass, and Nathaniel Winkle - form a society to report their adventures and observations. From these reports emerge the rascal Jingle and his servant, Job Trotter, Mr Wardle in his hospitable Dingley Dell, the engaging Sam Weller, the greedy drunkard Stiggins, and many more of Dickens's best-loved characters.

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Carole Jones, freelance writer and researcher. George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), follows the intertwining lives of the beautiful but spoiled and selfish Gwendolene Harleth and the selfless yet alienated Daniel Deronda, as they search for personal and vocational fulfilment and sympathetic relationship. Set largely in the degenerate English aristocratic society of the 1860s, Daniel Deronda charts their search for meaningful lives against a background of imperialism, the oppression of women, and racial and religious prejudice. Gwendolen's attempts to escape a sadistic relationship and atone for past actions catalyse her friendship with Deronda, while his search for origins leads him, via Judaism, to a quest for moral growth. Eliot's radical dual narrative constantly challenges all solutions and ensures that the novel is as controversial now, as when it first appeared.

Introduction and Notes by Norman Vance, Professor of English, University of Sussex Jude Fawley is a rural stone mason with intellectual aspirations. Frustrated by poverty and the indifference of the academic institutions at the University of Christminster, his only chance of fulfilment seems to lie in his relationship with his unconventional cousin, Sue Bridehead. But life as social outcasts proves undermining, and when tragedy occurs, Sue has no resilience and Jude is left in despair.

Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent at Canterbury Set in the reign of Richard I, Coeur de Lion, Ivanhoe is packed with memorable incidents - sieges, ambushes and combats - and equally memorable characters: Cedric of Rotherwood, the die-hard Saxon; his ward Rowena; the fierce Templar knight, Sir Brian de Bois-Gilbert; the Jew, Isaac of York, and his beautiful, spirited daughter Rebecca; Wamba and Gurth, jester and swineherd respectively. Scott explores the conflicts between the Crown and the powerful Barons, between the Norman overlords and the conquered Saxons, and between Richard and his scheming brother, Prince John. At the same time he brings into the novel the legendary Robin Hood and his band, and creates a brilliant, colourful account of the age of chivalry with all its elaborate rituals and costumes and its values of honour and personal glory.

With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies 'I saw him take a different shape before my eyes. His loose draperies fell about him...and there issued out of them a monstrous creature of the beetle tribe...' From out of the dark and mystic Egypt come The Beetle, a creature of horror, 'born of neither God nor man', which can change its form at will. It is bent on revenge for a crime committed against the devotees of an ancient religion. At large in London, it pursues its victims without mercy and no one, it seems, is safe from its gruesome clutches. Richard Marsh's weird, compelling and highly original novel, which once outsold Dracula, is both a horror masterpiece and a fin de siecle melodrama embracing the fears and concerns of late Victorian society. Long out of print, The Beetle is now available in this Wordsworth edition, ready to chill you to the marrow and give you nightmares.

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue. The Professor is Charlotte Brontë s first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth. Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like Lucy Snowe in Villette he leaves the certainties of England to forge a life in Brussels. But as a man, William has freedom of action, and as a writer Brontë is correspondingly liberated, exploring the relationship between power and sexual desire. William s first person narration reveals his attraction to the dominating directress of the girls school where he teaches, played out in the school s secret garden . Balanced against this is his more temperate relationship with one of his pupils, Frances Henri, in which mastery and submission interplay. The Professor was published only after Charlotte Brontë s death; today it gives us a fascinating insight into the first stirrings of her supreme creative imagination.

Introduction by and Notes by R.T. Jones, Honorary Fellow of the University of York This novel, based on George Eliot's own experiences of provincial life, is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age. As the headstrong Maggie Tulliver grows into womanhood, the deep love which she has for her brother Tom turns into conflict, because she cannot reconcile his bourgeois standards with her own lively intelligence. Maggie is unable to adapt to her community or break free from it, and the result, on more than one level, is tragedy.

Pollyanna #1 and Pollyanna #2 (Pollyanna Grows Up), by Eleanor H. Porter, are both included in this edition and are timeless, classic children's stories about the power of positivity and how profoundly it affects others. Pollyanna (Pollyanna book 1) Pollyanna Whittier has had a difficult life. Her mother died when she was little and all she's ever known is poverty. Then sadly, at the age of 11 her father passes away, leaving her an orphan. But this story isn't one about sadness! It's about overcoming the hard parts of life by thinking positively. Years before Pollyanna's father died, he gave her a gift in the form of a game; The Glad Game. This game, or rather philosophy, comes in handy in the new town she finds herself in, living as an orphan with her ill-tempered aunt in the city of Beldingsville. Pollyanna's exuberance and positivity affect everyone who meets her, and she spreads joy and love wherever she goes. Soon tragedy strikes and Pollyanna finds her optimistic attitude tested, and she must learn to find happiness again. Pollyanna Grows Up, Pollyanna book 2 In Pollyanna Grows Up, the only sequel written by Eleanor H. Porter herself, Pollyanna finds that despite overcoming the health issues that she faced in the original Pollyanna, adulthood brings fresh challenges to conquer. This Pollyanna sequel is told in two halves; the first part takes place about two years after the first book and the second half of the story races forward several years to follow a young 20-something year-old Pollyanna. Readers get to visit with beloved, familiar characters such as Aunt Polly, Dr. Chilton and Jimmy Bean. This story involves loss and hardship but largely focuses on love and growing up. The heart of this sequel remains consistent with the first, in that there is always something to be glad about. Pollyanna and Pollyanna Grows Up brings us a strong and admirable heroine, despite the modern, infamous use of the character s name to describe those who utilize false positivity or phony optimism. Pollyanna is able to change her circumstances, and the circumstances of those around her, by practicing being glad. Positivity is contagious and that lesson is still as relevant for young children today as it was in 1913 when this story was first published and flew off the shelves, the year leading up to WWI. This book is great for: YOUNG READERSFOSTER FAMILIES AND FOSTER KIDSCHILDREN AND KIDS WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED LOSSREADING ALOUD TOGETHERCHILDREN IN PHYSICAL THERAPY OR WITH PHYSICAL DISABILITIES

Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent. Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her. In this, her first full-length novel, Austen also fixes her sharp, ironic gaze on other kinds of contemporary novel, especially the Gothic school made famous by Ann Radcliffe. Catherine's reading becomes intertwined with her social and romantic adventures, adding to the uncertainties and embarrassments she must undergo before finding happiness.

With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex Laurence Sterne s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a huge literary paradox, for it is both a novel and an anti-novel. As a comic novel replete with bawdy humour and generous sentiments, it introduces us to a vivid group of memorable characters, variously eccentric, farcical and endearing. As an anti-novel, it is a deliberately tantalising and exuberantly egoistic work, ostentatiously digressive, involving the reader in the labyrinthine creation of a purported autobiography. This mercurial eighteenth-century text thus anticipates modernism and postmodernism. Vibrant and bizarre, Tristram Shandy provides an unforgettable experience. We may see why Nietzsche termed Sterne the most liberated spirit of all time .

Adopted into the household of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up a meek outsider among her cousins in the unaccustomed elegance of Mansfield Park. Soon after Sir Thomas absents himself on estate business in Antigua (the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in the Introduction in a new, post-colonial light), Mary Crawford and her brother Henry arrive at Mansfield, bringing with them London glamour, and the seductive taste for flirtation and theatre that precipitates a crisis. While Mansfield Park appears in some ways to continue where Pride and Prejudice left off, it is, as Kathryn Sutherland shows in her illuminating Introduction, a much darker work, which challenges 'the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement and faithfulness) it appears to endorse'. This new edition provides an accurate text based, for the first time since its original publication, on the first edition of 1814.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was born in Odense, the son of a shoemaker. His early life was wretched, but he was adopted by a patron and became a short-story writer, novelist and playwright, though he remains best-known for his magical fairy tales which were published between 1835 and 1872. For 150 years his stories have been delighting both adults and children. Packed with a light-hearted whimsy combined with a mature wisdom they are as entrancing as ever. Here are all of Andersen's 168 tales, and among the favourites are 'The Red Shoes', 'The Mermaid', 'The Real Princess', 'The Emperor's New Clothes', The Tinder Box' and of course 'The Ugly Duckling'.