Classic Books for Children Giveaway and Review Event September 4 – 30

Family Literacy and You & Mymcbooks Blog welcome you to our 1st Annual Classics 4 Kids Event.

We want to make sure that you and your child don’t forget the classics books. We will feature books reviews and biography of chosen classic authors. We’ll also giveaway free classic books for the month of September. We will feature 1 giveaway a week and the winner will be selected via random.org

Mymcbooks has chosen  Charles Dickens. We’ll features 1 classic book every week. This week is Oliver Twist

Biography

One of the grand masters of Victorian literature, Charles Dickens was born onFebruary 7, 1812, in Landport,Portsea,England. He died inKentonJune 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling atWellingtonHouseAcademy. He worked as an attorney’s clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.

Charles Dickens published over a dozen major novels, a large number of short stories (including a number of Christmas-themed stories), a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens’s novels were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.

Our first book for this event/giveaway will be Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens, published by Richard Bentley in 1838. The story is about an orphan Oliver Twist, who endures a miserable existence in a workhouse and then is placed with an undertaker. He escapes and travels to London where he meets the Artful Dodger, leader of a gang of juvenile pickpockets. Oliver is led to the lair of their elderly criminal trainer Fagin, naively unaware of their unlawful activities.

Oliver Twist is notable for Dickens’ unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives. The book exposed the cruel treatment of many a waif-child in London, which increased international concern in what is sometimes known as “The Great London Waif Crisis”: the large number of orphans in London in the Dickens era. The book’s subtitle, The Parish Boy’s Progress alludes to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and also to a pair of popular 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, “A Rake’s Progress” and “A Harlot’s Progress“.

An early example of the social novel, the book calls the public’s attention to various contemporary evils, including the Poor Law, child labour and the recruitment of children as criminals. Dickens mocks the hypocrisies of his time by surrounding the novel’s serious themes with sarcasm and dark humour. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of hardships as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens’s own early youth as a child labourer contributed to the story’s development.

Oliver Twist has been the subject of numerous film and television adaptations, and is the basis for a highly successful musical play, and the multiple Academy Award winning 1968 motion picture made from it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twist

GIVEAWAY

This Giveaway is Open to the US ONLY – Start 4^th – Ends 10^th

Please follow the Mandatory Rules.  Rules NOT followed will be deleted

Mandatory: Leave your comment and email address in the comment field below

Mandatory: Follow Family Literacy and You Visit http://familyliteracyandyou.blogspot.com/ 

 A copy of Charles Dickens Oliver Twist will be given to 1 winner selected by Random.org

Family Literacy and You!

Drop by Family Literacy and You to learn about the Turn of the 19th Century authors

 Family Literacy and You first book will be The Princess and the Goblin by George McDonald

About the book:
She immediately took off her ring and put it under her pillow. As she did so, she fancied she felt a finger and thumb take it gently from under her palm… and then, feeling with the forefinger of her right hand, (she) soon found her grandmother’s thread, which she proceeded at once to follow… To read more and enter this giveaway Visit http://familyliteracyandyou.blogspot.com/ 

 

This giveaway has ended! Check back later for the next classic book by Charles Dickens