A Clergyman’S Daughter (George Orwell)

Little Dorrit is a novel by Charles Dickens, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. The story features Amy Dorrit, youngest child of her family, born and raised in the Marshalsea prison for debtors in London. Arthur Clennam encounters her after returning home from a 20-year absence, ready to begin his life anew. The novel satirises some shortcomings of both government and society, including the institution of debtors’ prisons, where debtors were imprisoned, unable to work and yet incarcerated until they had repaid their debts. The prison in this case is the Marshalsea, where Dickens’ own father had been imprisoned. Dickens is also critical of the impotent bureaucracy of the British government, in this novel in the form of the fictional “Circumlocution Office”. Dickens also satirises the stratification of society that results from the British class system. Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English. Uyarı: Agora Bilim Pazarı'ndaki diğer birçok kitabın aksine, bu kitap İngilizcedir.

I Am a Cat is a satirical novel written in 1905–1906 by Natsume Sōseki about Japanese society during the Meiji period (1868–1912); particularly, the uneasy mix of Western culture and Japanese traditions. Sōseki's title, Wagahai wa Neko de Aru, uses a very high-register phrasing more appropriate to a nobleman, conveying grandiloquence and self-importance. This is somewhat ironic, since the speaker, an anthropomorphized domestic cat, is a regular house cat of a teacher, and not of a high-ranking noble as the manner of speech suggests. The book was first published in ten installments in the literary journal Hototogisu. At first, Sōseki intended only to write the short story that constitutes the first chapter of I Am a Cat.  However, Takahama Kyoshi, one of the editors of Hototogisu, persuaded Sōseki to serialize the work, which evolved stylistically as the installments progressed. Nearly all the chapters can stand alone as discrete works. Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English. Uyarı: Agora Bilim Pazarı'ndaki diğer birçok kitabın aksine, bu kitap İngilizcedir.

Burmese Days is the first novel by English writer George Orwell, published in 1934. Set in British Burma during the waning days of empire, when Burma was ruled from Delhi as part of British India, the novel serves as “a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj.” At the centre of the novel is John Flory, “the lone and lacking individual trapped within a bigger system that is undermining the better side of human nature.” The novel describes “both indigenous corruption and imperial bigotry” in a society where, “after all, natives were natives—interesting, no doubt, but finally...an inferior people”. Burmese Days was first published “further afield,” in the United States, because of concerns that it might be potentially libelous; that the real provincial town of Katha had been described too realistically; and that some of its fictional characters were based too closely on identifiable people. A British edition, with altered names, appeared a year later. Nonetheless, Orwell’s harsh portrayal of colonial society was felt by “some old Burma hands” to have “rather let the side down”. In a letter from 1946, Orwell wrote, “I dare say it’s unfair in some ways and inaccurate in some details, but much of it is simply reporting what I have seen”. Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English. Uyarı: Agora Bilim Pazarı'ndaki diğer birçok kitabın aksine, bu kitap İngilizcedir.

Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode serial between March 1852 and September 1853. The novel has many characters and several sub-plots, and is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At the centre of Bleak House is a long-running legal case in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which comes about because a testator has written several conflicting wills. In a preface to the 1853 first edition, Dickens claimed there were many actual precedents for his fictional case. One such was probably the Thellusson v Woodford case in which a will read in 1797 was contested and not determined until 1859. Though many in the legal profession criticised Dickens's satire as exaggerated, this novel helped support a judicial reform movement which culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s. Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English. Uyarı: Agora Bilim Pazarı'ndaki diğer birçok kitabın aksine, bu kitap İngilizcedir.