Some Short Christmas Stories (Charles Dickens)

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.

Captains Courageous is an 1897 novel, by Rudyard Kipling, that follows the adventures of fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the spoiled son of a railroad tycoon, after he is saved from drowning by a Portuguese fisherman in the north Atlantic. The novel originally appeared as a serialisation in McClure’s, beginning with the November 1896 edition with the last instalment appearing in May 1897. In that year it was then published in its entirety as a novel, first in the United States by Doubleday, and a month later in the United Kingdom by Macmillan. It is Kipling’s only novel set entirely in North America. In 1900, Teddy Roosevelt extolled the book in his essay “What We Can Expect of the American Boy,” praising Kipling for describing “in the liveliest way just what a boy should be and do.” The book’s title comes from the ballad “Mary Ambree”, which starts, “When captains courageous, whom death could not daunt”. Kipling had previously used the same title for an article on businessmen as the new adventurers, published in The Times of 23 November 1892. 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.

American Notes for General Circulation is a travelogue by Charles Dickens detailing his trip to North America from January to June 1842. While there he acted as a critical observer of North American society, almost as if returning a status report on their progress. This can be compared to the style of his Pictures from Italy written four years later, where he wrote far more like a tourist. His American journey was also an inspiration for his novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Having arrived in Boston, he visited Lowell, New York, and Philadelphia, and travelled as far south as Richmond, as far west as St. Louis and as far north as Quebec. The American city he liked best was Boston – "the air was so clear, the houses were so bright and gay. [...] The city is a beautiful one, and cannot fail, I should imagine, to impress all strangers very favourably." Further, it was close to the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind where Dickens encountered Laura Bridgman, who impressed him greatly. 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.