Mansfield Park is largely considered to be one of Jane Austen’s most ambitious novels, a darkly satirical glimpse into morality and social mobility within the nineteenth-century British class system.

In Bath, Catherine Morland meets Henry, a suitor and a fellow devotee of Gothic novels who invites her to his family home, Northanger Abbey. Ruins, locked doors, dark corridors… how could she refuse?

 “Notes on the Cuff,” a comically autobiographical account of how the tenacious young writer managed to begin his literary career despite famine, typhus, civil war, the wrong political affiliation, and the Byzantine Moscow bureaucracy.

Oliver Twist is a story of a young orphan. His life in the workhouse is lonely and sad. Oliver becomes an apprentice for an undertaker but runs away after he gets into a fight with another apprentice.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Introduction and Notes by Dr Ella Westland, University of Exeter Dickens had already achieved renown with The Pickwick Papers.