Complete and unabridged, with 53 full-page plates by James Wilson Carmichael, Henry Mark Anthony and George Morland. A mill town where the schoolmaster teaches nothing but facts, the mill owner believes in nothing but arithmetic, and a circus turns out to be the only honest institution in the book. Dickens set it in a place he called Coketown after visiting Preston during a strike, and made it his shortest novel because it ran weekly and space was tight. Ruskin thought it his best. Fifty-three paintings from 1767 to 1906, among them George Elgar Hicks and William Collins, picture the ordinary working lives of the Victorian town.