World Classics by Peacock Books

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, usually shortened to just Hamlet, was written by Shakespeare sometime between 1599–1602. It is arguably one of his most famous tragedies. The lines from Hamlet's monologue in act three that begin "To be, o...

The Merchant of Venice is a 16th century play written by Shakespeare between 1596-1598 in which a merchant in Venice must default on a large loan provided by a Jewish moneylender, Shylock. It is usually classified as a romantic comedy though its d...

In the delightful social comedy of Pride and Prejudice (1813) Jane Austen delicately handles the problem of love and money in marriage where, in spite of many hurdles, eventually love triumphs over 'pride' and 'prejudice'. With a mild satiric tone...

The Tragedy of Macbeth, or Macbeth, is one of his Shakespeare's shorter tragedies, and was probably written between 1599–1606, and is thought to have been first performed in 1606. This play was penned the play during the region of James V1, who wa...

Jane Eyre remains one of the most widely read of English Classics. In this novel, Charlotte Bronte invented a romantic tale of passion and thrill and created one of the most unforgettable heroines of all the times. When her first novel, The Profes...

The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice, or simply Othello, is a tragedy written in approximately 1603. One of Shakespeare's most tightly woven works, it explores themes of racism, betrayal, love, revenge, and forgiveness, and has spawned multi...

The Waves by Virginia Woolf The Waves is Virginia Woolf’s most audacious exploration of the possibilities of the novel form. Instead of narrating her characters’ outward actions, Woolf enters their minds and reports their thoughts and perceptions ...

The goal of yoga science is to calm the mind, that without distortion it may hear the infallible counsel of the Inner Voice. First published in 1946, The Autobiography of a Yogi recounts the life of Paramahansa Yogananda, born as Mukunda Lal Ghos...

Lewis Carroll's masterpieces, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass, mark an epoch in the history of dream literature, having as much appeal for adults as for children. The story is of a girl Alice, who chasing ...

A Midsummer Night's Dream, comedy in five acts by Shakespeare, written about 1595-96 and published in 1600 in a quarto edition from the author's manuscript. With its multilayered examination of love and its vagaries, it has long been one of the mo...

“I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics.” A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett follows the heartwarming story of Sara Crewe, a young girl with a vivid imagination, who attends Miss Minchin’s school in London....

A classic that took the world by storm, raising havoc among scientists and religious people as its exposition apparently contradicted the account of the creation of the world of Genesis in the Bible, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species remains ...

Interest in supernatural phenomena was high during the time of Charles Dickens. He was open-minded, willing to accept, and put to test the existence of spirits. A fascinating and lesser known side of Dickens’s work is his flair for ghost stories. ...

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by Shakespeare early in his career between 1591-1595 about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifet...

The initial fame of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 was due to Gitanjali which was published from London in 1912, although Tagore had published another Gītānjali in Bengali in 1910. Deeply rooted...

Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel, To the Lighthouse, was widely praised and has remained the most popular of all her novels. It is considered among the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century. There is minimal action. The novel works t...

The Wind in the Willows is a book of linked animal tales that began as a series of bedtime stories and was published in 1908. It is beautifully written with evocative descriptions of the countryside interspersed with exciting adventures and became...

The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), is an exquisite portrait of village life whose idealization of the countryside, where sentimental moralizing, and melodramatic incidents are based on a sharp but good-natured irony. It was one of the most popular an...

Collection of (1) The Mayor of Casterbridge; The Mayor of Casterbridge displays the influence of Hardy's upbringing, rural background, and architectural studies. His characters are primitive and exhibit all the passions, hates, loves and jealousie...

Collection of (1) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes ; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twelve short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, featuring his most famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The individual stories had been s...

The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice, or simply Othello, is a tragedy written in approximately 1603. One of Shakespeare's most tightly woven works, it explores themes of racism, betrayal, love, revenge, and forgiveness, and has spawned multi...

“Nothing once begun should be abandoned unless it is proved to be morally wrong.” The Story of My Experiments with Truth is the intimate memoir of Mahatma Gandhi, a towering figure in the history of nonviolent resistance and social justice. Origin...

Collection of (1) Macbeth; The Tragedy of Macbeth, or Macbeth, is one of his Shakespeare's shorter tragedies, and was probably written between 1599–1606, and is thought to have been first performed in 1606. (2) Romeo And Juliet; Romeo and Juliet i...

Collection of (1) Macbeth; The Tragedy of Macbeth, or Macbeth, is one of his Shakespeare's shorter tragedies, and was probably written between 1599–1606, and is thought to have been first performed in 1606. (2) Romeo And Juliet; Romeo and Juliet...

(1) The Jungle Books: - Kipling's allegory, The Jungle Books, set in India and filled with high adventure and extraordinary characters that touch both our intellect and our emotions, is an unforgettable mythic tale of a boy Mowgli, the fearless ma...

PLATO, born around 428 BC in Athens, was a philosopher and mathematician in Classical Greece. He was the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world, and is arguably one of the greatest writers i...

“Half of happiness is the recognition that we are happy; and half of misery is the forgetting how many causes of happiness we have.” For many, the quest for happiness is a never-ending journey. The Pursuit of Happiness by Daniel G. Brinton trans...

“…they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society.” The Poverty of Philosophy by Karl Marx is a groundbreaking exploration of the economic and philosophical fo...

A universal classic and a masterful exploration of humanity’s unending struggle with sin, guilt and pride, The Scarlet Letter is a foundational work of American literature. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a ...

The George Bernard Shaw Collection (Peacock Classics) is a remarkable compilation of seven of Shaw’s most influential plays. Known for his wit, social criticism, and sharp dialogue, Shaw remains one of the most celebrated playwrights in English li...

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a quintessential guide to understanding modern economics, exerting a profound influence on economic theory and practice. In this seminal work, Keynes tackles the complexities of economic cycl...

Collection of (1) Pride and Prejudice: "In the delightful social comedy of Pride and Prejudice (1813) Jane Austen delicately handles the problem of love and money in marriage where, in spite of many hurdles, eventually love triumphs over 'pride' a...

“The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings” Principles of Economicsby Alfred Marshal is a foundational text that continues to shape our understanding of economic theory. First published in 1890, Marshall's magnum opus revo...

King Lear is one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies and was believed to have been written be-tween 1605-1606, and was based on a legend of the Leir of Britain, a pre-Roman Celtic king from my-thology. It brilliantly depicts the senility and in...

Wuthering Heights is a classic tale of possessive and thwarted passion, one of the forerunners of today's soap operas and romance novels. The tempestuous and mythic story of Catherine Earnshaw, the precocious daughter of the house, and the ruggedl...

Rated among the most excellent works of American fiction, Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer paints an unforgettable picture of Mississippi frontier life, combining picaresque adventure with challenging satire and great innovative p...

When Frankenstein, a young idealist Genevan student of natural philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt, stumbled into the secret of infusing life into matter, and created a living thing out of an assemblage of bones from charnel houses, little ...

Three Men in a Boat, published in 1889, is a humorous account of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of loca...

The Time Machine is a social allegory set in the year 802701 A.D., describing a society divided into two classes, the subterranean workers, called Morlocks, and the decadent Eloi. The central character, referred to throughout as the Time Traveller...

The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is Henry James's early novel of psychological realism, in which various types of American character are transplanted into the European environment. Upon her father's death, the high-minded heroine Isabela Archer is vi...

The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', published in 1897, is widely regarded as the finest and the strongest picture of the sea and sea life that the English language possesses. Framed around a sea voyage from Bombay to London, the action concentrates on ...

The Ambassadors, published in 1903, is considered by theauthor himself to be his most 'perfect' work of art. In this novel, with much humour and delicacy of perception, the author depicts the reaction of different American types to the European en...

Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Age of Innocence is a social satire, a bitter-sweet romance, bringing to life the grandeur and hypocrisy of the stuffy upper crust of 1870s New York. Rich, intriguing and beautifully written,...

Silas Marner is an impressive narrative, spiced with rustic humour and replete with forceful village characters. Accused of a false charge of theft that Silas Marner did not commit, he leaves his small religious community and takes refuge in the a...

Northanger Abbey, written during the same period as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, represents Jane Austen's genius at its freshest and most enchanting. It grew out of her distaste for the absurdities of the novels of her time and i...

Special Features: enotes.com Middlemarch (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters); Middlemarch (Magill Book Reviews); Middlemarch (Masterplots, Revised Second Edition) ... Read full review

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England’s national poet and t...

Dubliners is one of the most magnificent short story collections in the English language. The manuscript was sent to the English publisher, Grant Richards in late 1905. After initial enthusiasm for the book, Richards became uncomfortable about sex...

Around the World in Eighty Days is a classic adventure novel by Jules Verne. It is the story of a rich English gentleman living a life of modesty and solitude. Phileas Fogg accepts a challenge from his fellow members at the Reform Club and sets of...

The novel is based on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist preacher, of a confession made to her by a girl in the condemned cell at Nottingham gaol awaiting execution for the murder of her child. Hetty Sorrel, pret...

Set in the rural midlands of England, The Rainbow chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family, conveying how their rural existence is gradually but profoundly changed by the influx of industry and urbanism. But it is far more ...

The novel is set in the period of George Eliot’s own childhood, in the pre-railway, pre-industrial age, with its settled and secure order, and patterns of life and trade inherited from the earlier period. Tom and Maggie, the principal characters, ...

Collection of (1) Pride And Prejudice; In the delightful social comedy of Pride and Prejudice (1813) Jane Austen delicately handles the problem of love and money in marriage where, in spite of many hurdles, eventually love triumphs over 'pride' an...

This nightmarish tale by H.G. Wells contains all the suspense and adventure of science fiction at its best. It begins with a quiet country inn and a mysterious stranger, his features masked by gloves, dark glasses, and bandages that completely cov...

Collection of (1) Lady Chatterley's Lover : "Regarded notoriously pornographic when published in 1928, the novel is a triumph of passion, an erotic celebration of life, exploring the emotions of a lonely woman, Constance Chatterley, trapped in a s...

Collection of (1) Oliver Twist : The only token of identity left by Dicken's dying mother to Oliver Twist – born in the workhouse, and orphaned at birth – is stolen. Spending his early childhood in neglect and near starvation Oliver joins the work...

Collection of (1) Robinson Crusoe: "Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has remained one of the best-known and most read of English novels. It gained popularity among children and adults alike. The adventure story became one of the classics of Engl...

Rated among the most excellent works of American fiction, Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn paints an unforgettable picture of Mississippi frontier life, combining picaresque adventure with challenging satire and great innova...

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a brilliant tale of seduction, love, betrayal, and murder, is generally regarded as Thomas Hardy’s finest novel. This is a tragic story of the intelligent, charming and naturally dignified Tess. Daughter of a poor villa...

Journey to the Centre of the Earth published in 1864 in French as Voyage au centre de la Terre is the second book in Verne's popular science-fiction series Voyages Extraordinaires (1863-1910). The story involves German professor Otto Lidenbrock wh...