After orphan Oliver Twist asks for more food, he has to flee the workhouse and ends up on the streets of London. There he meets the Artful Dodger, who leads him to Fagin and his gang of pickpockets. When a thieving mission goes wrong, Oliver narrowly avoids prison and finds himself in the care of kind Mr. Brownlow. But Fagin and the brutal Bill Sikes go in search of the young orphan, determined to drag him back.

A classic tale of an orphan growing up in the 1800's of England. Intimately rooted in the author's own biography and written as a first-person narrative, "David Copperfield" charts a young man's progress through a difficult childhood in Victorian England to ultimate success as a novelist, finding true love along the way. Jeremy Tambling's provocative Introduction reveals subtle themes relevant today in Dickens' favorite work

The orphaned Pip is serving as a blacksmith's apprentice when an unknown benefactor supplies the means for him to be educated in London as a gentleman of "great expectations." "Charles Dickens's 'Great Expectations' is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mystery and a profound examination of moral values. An orphan living with his older sister and her kindly husband, Pip is hired by wealthy and embittered Miss Havisham as a companion...