Martin Chuzzlewit

"An exquisite delight . . . A consummate work of art. . . . New York society and customs in the seventies are described with an accuracy that is almost uncanny; to read these pages is to live again . . . The love scenes between [Newland] and Ellen are wonderful in their terrible, inarticulate passion; it is curious how much more real they are than the unrestrained detailed descriptions thought by so many writers to be 'realism' . . . So little is said, so little is done, yet one feels the infinite passion in the finite hearts that burn. . . . The appearance of such a book as THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by an American is a matter for public rejoicing. It is one of the best novels of the twentieth century and looks like a permanent addition to literature."

--The New York Times Book Review

October 17, 1920

"THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is a masterly achievement. In lonely contrast to almost all the novelists who write about fashionable New York, [Wharton] knows her world. . . . [Her] triumph is that she had described these rites and surfaces and burdens as familiarly as if she loved them and as lucidly as if she hated them."

--The Nation, November 3, 1920

"Mrs. Wharton opens to life a free and swinging door . . . The 'best people' are, after all, a trite subject for the analyst, but in this novel Mrs. Wharton has shown them to be, for her, a superb subject. She has made of them a clear, composed, rounded work of art . . . She has preserved a given period in her amber--a pale, pure amber that has living light."

--The New Republic, November 17, 1920

Charles Dickens (1812-1870), despite an impoverished childhood and little formal education, achieved lasting artistic and popular success with the novels Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, all of which were originally published in serial form.

Patricia Ingham is a Fellow of St. Anne's College, Reader in English, and The Times Lecturer in English Language at Oxford University.

Wordsworth Classics covers a huge list of beloved works of literature in English and translations. This growing series is rigorously updated, with scholarly introductions and notes added to new titles.