“The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home” is a novella by Charles Dickens and the third in his “Christmas Books” series published after “The Chimes (1844) and before “The Battle of Life” (1846). Dickens's Christmas novels perfectly enraptured the spirit of the Victorian Christmas revival and even inspired a number of traditional aspects of the holiday, including seasonal food and drink, family gatherings, dancing, and more. Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870) was an English writer and social critic famous for having created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters. His works became unprecedentedly popular during his life, and today he is commonly regarded as the greatest Victorian-era novelist. Although perhaps better known for such works as “Great Expectations” or “A Christmas Carol”, Dickens first gained success with the 1836 serial publication of “The Pickwick Papers”, which turned him almost overnight into an international literary celebrity thanks to his humour, satire, and astute observations concerning society and character. This classic work is being republished now in a new edition complete with an introductory chapter from “Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens” by G. K. Chesterton.

Read through time, enjoying the good, the better, and the best books from each of the seven eras below: Year 1: Ancient History to 476 A.D. Year 2: The Middle Ages, 477 to 1485 A.D. Year 3: The Age of Discovery, 1485-1763 A.D. Year 4: The Age of Revolution, 1764-1848 A.D. Year 5: The Age of Empire, 1849-1914 A.D. Year 6: The American Century, 1915-1995 A.D. Year 7: The Information Age, 1996- Present Day At the end of seven years, repeat! A Seven Year Cycle Reading Plan is a booklist compiled of hundreds of books from each era in history organized into categories of interest. This volume also includes copious room for you to add your own favorite titles!

Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.

A world list of books in the English language.

This book may not be, Chesterton says, important as a contribution to history, but it is important as a contribution to biography; as a contribution to the character and the career of the man who wrote it, a typical man of his time. That Dickens made no personal historical researches, that he had no special historical learning, that he had not had, in truth, even anything that could be called a good education, all this accentuates not the merit but at least the importance of the book. For here, thinks Mr. Chesterton, may be read in plain popular language, written by a man whose genius for popular exposition has never been surpassed among men, a brief account of the origin and meaning of England as it seemed to the average Englishman of that age. This book will always remain as a bright and brisk summary of the cock-sure, healthy-minded, essentially manly and essentially ungentlemanly view of history which characterises the Radicals of that particular Radical era.