The adventures of an orphaned young man in Victorian England who is given a great deal of money by an unknown benefactor to enable him to live as a gentleman, pursuing a good education and fulfilling great expectations.

"In an alternative version of Victorian London, a seventeen-year-old Dodger, a cunning and cheeky street urchin, unexpectedly rises in life when he saves a mysterious girl, meets Charles Dickens, and unintentionally puts a stop to the murders of Sweeny Todd"--

The lives of twenty writers, ranging from Dickens, the Brontes, and Poe to Twain, Sandburg, and Langston Hughes, are profiled in this humorous and informative collection.

Now a major motion picture directed by Ralph Fiennes, co-starring Fiennes and Felicity Jones with Michelle Fairley, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Tom Hollander: the unforgettable story of Charles Dickens's mistress Nelly Ternan, and of the secret relationship that linked them. When Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857, she was 18: a professional actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep. He was 45: a literary legend, a national treasure,...

London, 1858. Noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. Ashton reveals that thanks to significant, if unrecognized, turning points the months from May to August turned out to be a summer of consequence. She mines Victorian letters and gossip, diaries, court records, newspapers, and other contemporary sources to uncover historically crucial moments in...