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A Christmas Carol: The miserly Ebenezer Scrooge tries to ignore Christmas and is haunted by the ghost of his former partner, Marley, and by the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come, who show him the error of his ways.

David Copperfield: Dickens’s favorite—the life story of a boy who is sent to boarding school by his evil stepfather, runs away to his eccentric aunt, becomes a lawyer, and then a writer. Sounds pretty dull, but really it is about growing up, learning from experience, and coming to terms with life. It’s full of colorful characters such as Mr. Micawber, always hoping that something will turn up; the ever so ’umble Uriah Heep; Aunt Betsy Trotwood; and her mad companion, Mr. Dick, who is obsessed with the execution of Charles I; not to mention the Peggotty family, the deeply drippy Dora, and the saintly Agnes.

Oliver Twist: About the boy from the workhouse who is kicked out after he “wants some more” food and finds his way into a gang of pickpockets led by Fagin. The novel contains considerably more misery and rather less singing and dancing than the musical version.

If you don’t remember much about Dickens, chances are most of the characters you do recall are from the ones previously mentioned from David Copperfield; the Artful Dodger, Nancy, the evil Bill Sikes, and Mr. Bumble the beadle from Oliver Twist; and Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol. But here are a few more stories that may ring bells:

The plot of Bleak House centers around the ongoing case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, which eventually eats up all the money that is being disputed; the Circumlocution Office, Dickens’s savage attack on civil service bureaucracy, appears in Little Dorrit; and Barnaby Rudge is set against the background of the Gordon Riots (anti-Catholic riots in London in 1780).

☞ SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)

William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and a number of much longer poems. There isn’t room in this book to summarize all the plays, so here are—arguably—the 10 best known.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: Another one where everyone dies. Hamlet’s father, also Hamlet, has died in suspicious circumstances, and his widow, Gertrude, has married—with indecent haste—Hamlet senior’s brother, Claudius. The ghost of King Hamlet tells his son that he has been murdered by Claudius. Prince Hamlet then spends much of the play worrying about what to do and talking to himself—hence all the famous soliloquies. He has previously been attached to Ophelia, daughter of Polonius, the lord chamberlain, but he now rejects her (“Get thee to a nunnery”). Talking to his mother in her room, Hamlet realizes that someone is eavesdropping behind a wall hanging, and Hamlet stabs the individual, believing it to be Claudius. It is, in fact, Polonius. Ophelia goes mad and drowns herself. Her brother, Laertes, is determined to avenge his family, so Claudius arranges a fencing match in which Laertes will have a poisoned sword. Laertes wounds Hamlet; then there is a scuffle in which the two exchange swords and Hamlet wounds Laertes. Knowing that he is dying, Laertes confesses, Hamlet stabs Claudius, and Gertrude drinks poisoned wine that Claudius had prepared as a fallback for outing Hamlet. “Good night, sweet prince,” says his friend Horatio as he prepares to clear up the mess.

Hamlet contains more quotations than the other plays. For example, Polonius’s paternal advice to his son Laertes:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be:

For loan oft loses both itself and friend;

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all—to thine own self be true;

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

And a bit of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy…

To be, or not to be; that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural