The Charles Dickens Value Collection: The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnab Ridge, A Tale of Two Cities

The Old Curiosity Shop is a story of contrasts:  youth and old age, beauty and deformity, freedom and restraint. Expansively comic, sentimentally tragic, it it sometimes fairytale and sometimes myth.

Barnaby Rudge, Dickens' magnificent tale of private lives and public events takes place in the seething unrest of the 1780's London.  With a richly diverse cast of characters, Dickens weaves the complex themes of public authority and rebellion with the private conflicts of fathers and sons in a spellbinding, fictional recreation of the Gordon Riots.

The spectre of the revolution, the flaming chateaux, the ferocious mobs, the rumbling of the death carts, the hiss and thud of the guillotine, the storming of the Bastille - all are vividly portrayed in Charles Dickens' great French Revolutionary romance, A Tale of Two Cities which dashes back and forth from London to Paris during the nightmare of The Terror.