Pearl Fishing

Pearl-Fishing gathers memorable tales from Dickens' Household Words, offering readers a vivid range of voices, moods, and moral contrasts. Here are stories of social injustice, domestic sorrow, comic satire, and haunted self-reckoning, each marked by sharp observation and a storyteller's instinct for revealing character. In The Serf of Pobereze, the brutal world of Russian serfdom is laid bare as a young girl is torn from her adopted home for service at Count Roszynski's estate. Other pieces turn inward: one follows Susan Palmer through grief, scandal, and the hard-won reconciliation of a mother and daughter; another traces a family's rise and ruin in an old churchyard beneath a yew tree, where love, pride, repentance, and mortality meet. Elsewhere, a satirical eye exposes the absurdities of fashionable display, while a navy lieutenant's near-fatal descent into dissipation becomes a darkly comic warning about pleasure, duty, and redemption. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.