As for many of Dickens' novels, highlighting social injustices is at the heart of Little Dorrit. His father was imprisoned for debt, and Dickens' shines a spotlight on the fate of many who are unable to repay a debt when the ability to seek work is denied. Amy Dorrit is the youngest daughter of a man imprisoned for debt and is working as a seamstress for Mrs Clennam when Arthur Clennam crosses her path. Will the sweet natured Amy win Arthur's heart? And will they ever escape the shadow of debtors' prison?

'Clennam rose softly, opened and closed the door without a sound, and passed from the prison, carrying the quiet with him into the turbulent streets.' Introspective and dreamy, Arthur Clennam returns to England from many years abroad to find a people gripped in their self-made social and mental prisons. Against a background of government incompetence and financial scandal, he searches for the key to the affairs of the Dorrit family, prisoners for debt in the Marshalsea. He discovers through the seamstress Amy Dorrit the fulfilment of which he dreams, but only after he learns to understand his own heart. Revelation and redemption haunt Dickens's portrayal of human relations as fundamentally distorted by class and money. The swindling financier Merdle, the bureaucratic nightmare of the Circumlocution Office, and a teeming cast of characters display the inadequacy of secular morality in the face of contemporary social and political confusion. Mixing humour and pathos, irony and satire, Dickens's eleventh novel reveals a master of fiction in top form. This new edition, based on the definitive Clarendon text, includes all of Phiz's original illustrations and a wide-ranging introduction highlighting Dickens's move to more personal and spiritual concerns. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Tells the story of Hattie Coram, who was abandoned as a baby at the London Foundling Hospital. She is trained as a domestic servant and becomes a maid in Charles Dickens' household where she is plagued by the nickname "Tattycoram" and eventually used by Dickens as a character in his novel, Little Dorrit.

"The Signal-Man" is a horror/mystery story by Charles Dickens, first published as part of the Mugby Junction collection in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round.The railway signal-man of the title tells the narrator of an apparition that has been haunting him. Each spectral appearance precedes a tragic event on the railway on which the signalman works. The signalman's work is at a signal-box in a deep cutting near a tunnel entrance on a lonely stretch of the railway line, and he controls the movements of passing trains. When there is danger, his fellow signalmen alert him by telegraph and alarms. Three times, he receives phantom warnings of danger when his bell rings in a fashion that only he can hear. Each warning is followed by the appearance of the specter, and then by a terrible accident.The first accident involves a terrible collision between two trains in the tunnel. Dickens may have based this incident on the Clayton Tunnel crash[1] that occurred in 1861, five years before he wrote the story. Readers in 1866 would have been familiar with this major disaster. The second warning involves the mysterious death of a young woman on a passing train. The final warning is a premonition of the signalman's own death"

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.