• Moby Dick

    Moby Dick

    It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every…

  • Vanity Fair

    Vanity Fair

    While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig,…

  • Little Men

    Little Men

    “Please, sir, is this Plumfield?” asked a ragged boy of the man who opened the great gate at which the omnibus left him. “Yes. Who sent you?” “Mr. Laurence. I have got a letter for the lady.” “All right; go up to the house, and give it to her; she’ll see to you, little chap.”…

  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

    To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise…

  • Night and Day

    Night and Day

    It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other young ladies of her class, Katharine Hilbery was pouring out tea. Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning and this rather subdued moment,…

  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

    Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

    Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures…

  • Roderick Hudson

    Roderick Hudson

    Mallet had made his arrangements to sail for Europe on the first of September, and having in the interval a fortnight to spare, he determined to spend it with his cousin Cecilia, the widow of a nephew of his father. He was urged by the reflection that an affectionate farewell might help to exonerate him…

  • A Journey to the Center of the Earth

    A Journey to the Center of the Earth

    On the 24th of May, 1863, my uncle, Professor Liedenbrock, rushed into his little house, No. 19 K‚‚‚‚‚‚‚¶nigstrasse, one of the oldest streets in the oldest portion of the city of Hamburg. Martha must have concluded that she was very much behindhand, for the dinner had only just been put into the oven. “Well, now,”…

  • Frankenstein

    Frankenstein

    How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow! Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise. I have hired a vessel and am occupied in collecting my sailors; those whom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom I can depend and are certainly possessed of…

  • David Copperfield

    David Copperfield

    Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve…