Child's History of England

England from the Romans to the Revolution of 1688, told by Dickens to his own children in a voice that never pretends the kings were admirable. He wrote it in the same years as Bleak House, and his verdicts - on Henry VIII, on the Stuarts, on anyone who burned people - are delivered without the historian's hedging. It is a partisan book by a great novelist, and no child who reads it forgets whose side he is on. Thirty paintings of castles, coast and shipwreck by Henry Bright and David Cox Jr. give the turbulent centuries a fittingly dramatic face.