Books in Pop Classics series

As a young orphan, Pip encounters an escaped criminal while living with his cruel sister. He is then sent to spend time with the eccentric Miss Havisham and her cold, beautiful ward, Estella, who enchants Pip. As a young man, Pip is given money by a mysterious benefactor, who turns out to be both the convict and Estella's father. With the hopes of winning Estella's love and becoming a gentleman in London, Pip is tasked with many "great expectations."

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel. Renowned for its intensity and outstandingly vivid prose, it broke existing boundaries between fiction and reality and helped to make Plath an enduring feminist icon. It was published under a pseudonym a few weeks before the author's suicide.'This terse account of an American girl's breakdown and treatment gains its considerable power from an objectivity that is extraordinary considering the nature of the material. Sylvia Plath's attention had the quality of ruthlessness . . . Imagery and rhetoric is disciplined by an unwinking intelligence.' Observer

Written when Engels was only twenty-four, and inspired in particular by his time living among the poor in Manchester, this forceful polemic explores the staggering human cost of the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England. Engels paints an unforgettable picture of daily life in the new industrial towns, and for miners and agricultural workers—depicting overcrowded housing, abject poverty, child labour, sexual exploitation, dirt and drunkenness—in a savage indictment of the greed of the bourgeoisie. His fascinating later preface, written for the first English edition of 1892 and included here, brought the story up to date in the light of forty years’ further reflection. A masterpiece of committed reporting and an impassioned call to arms, this is one of the great pioneering works of social history. Based on the original translation by Florence Wischnewetzky, this volume is edited by Victor Kiernan, whose foreword considers Engels’s friendship with Marx, and the book’s position as a seminal work of socialism. Also included are notes, a detailed index, new chronology and further reading and a revised forward.

Oliver Twist's famous cry of the heart - "Please, sir, I want some more" - has resounded with generations of readers of all ages. The author poured his own youthful experience of Victorian London's unspeakable squalor into this realistic depiction of a spirited young innocent's unwilling but inevitable recruitment into a scabrous gang of thieves. Masterminded by the loathsome Fagin, the underworld crew features some of Dickens's most memorable characters, including the vicious Bill Sikes, gentle Nancy, and the juvenile pickpocket known as the Artful Dodger.

Featured title in the 2018 PBS Great American Reads“I think the reason we’re so struck by [Jane Eyre] is how Charlotte Brontë manages to relate, expertly, what it means to be a human being...and that never changes.” (Narrator Thandie Newton)Following Jane from her childhood as an orphan in Northern England through her experience as a governess at Thornfield Hall, Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic classic is an early exploration of women’s independence in the mid-19th century and the pervasive societal challenges women had to endure. At Thornfield, Jane meets the complex and mysterious Mr. Rochester, with whom she shares a complicated relationship that ultimately forces her to reconcile the conflicting passions of romantic love and religious piety. Performing the early Victorian novel with great care and respect, actress Thandie Newton (Crash, The Pursuit of Happyness) draws out Jane Eyre’s intimacy and depth while conveying how truly progressive Brontë was in an era of extreme restraint.

Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public, first in France, then in Germany and America, and finally in England. In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest writers of our times: 'The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed our century, stand more than any other man as the incarnation of the whole race', because 'a whole world lived in him and spoke through his mouth'. Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic world, to which it was 'an honour to have been expressed by so great a Master'. As regards his method of dealing with his material and shaping it into mould, he stands even higher than as a pure creator. Tolstoy is more plastical, and certainly as deep and original and rich in creative power as Turgenev, and Dostoevsky is more intense, fervid, and dramatic. But as an artist, as master of the combination of details into a harmonious whole, as an architect of imaginative work, he surpasses all the prose writers of his country, and has but few equals among the great novelists of other lands. To one familiar with all Turgenev's works it is evident that he possessed the keys of all human emotions, all human feelings, the highest and the lowest, the novel as well as the base. But there was in him such a love of light, sunshine, and living human poetry, such an organic aversion for all that is ugly, or coarse and discordant, that he makes himself almost exclusively the poet of the gentler side of human nature. We may say that the description of love is Turgenev's speciality.

After hearing how the toy nutcracker that she and her brother received for Christmas got his ugly face, Marie helps break the spell he is under and watches him change into a handsome prince. Illustrated notes throughout the text explain the historical background of the story.After hearing how the toy nutcracker that she and her brother received for Christmas got his ugly face, Marie helps break the spell he is under and watches him change into a handsome prince