A Room at Mrs Lirriper's

Charles Dickens at his funniest, with four Christmas tales full of the London characters he loved best.

Mrs Lirriper keeps lodgings off the Strand, and in Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings and Mrs Lirriper's Legacy she tells, in her own unstoppable voice, how she and her lodger the Major came to raise an orphan boy. In Somebody's Luggage, a head waiter finds a bundle of stories stuffed into a forgotten guest's bags, and in Mugby Junction a mysterious traveller steps off a train at a busy railway junction and finds a new purpose in the lives around it, including the famous ghost story The Signal-Man.

Written for the Christmas issues of Dickens's own magazine, these stories were among the best-selling things he ever published, and they remain a delight to hear aloud.