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Charles Dickens

120 audiobooks

Charles Dickens is one of the greatest novelists in the English language and arguably the most influential writer of the Victorian era. His works — rich in character, social commentary, humour, and pathos — have been in continuous publication since they first appeared in the nineteenth century and remain among the most widely read and adapted novels in the world. Born in Portsmouth, Hampshire in 1812, Dickens endured a famously difficult childhood. When his father was imprisoned for debt, the twelve-year-old Charles was sent to work in a blacking factory — an experience that scarred him deeply and infused his fiction with a passionate concern for poverty, injustice, and the suffering of children. He began his literary career as a journalist and essayist before publishing The Pickwick Papers in serial form in 1836-37, which made him a celebrity almost overnight. There followed an astonishing run of novels that defined Victorian literature: Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, among many others. Dickens created some of the most memorable characters in all of fiction — Ebenezer Scrooge, Miss Havisham, Fagin, Mr Micawber, Uriah Heep, Sydney Carton — each so vivid they have become part of the cultural fabric. His ability to combine comedy and tragedy, social criticism and entertainment, complex plotting and emotional directness was unmatched in his time and has rarely been equalled since. He was also a gifted public performer, giving dramatic readings from his works to packed audiences in Britain and America. These performances were essentially the Victorian equivalent of audiobooks — Dickens bringing his characters to life through his own voice and stagecraft. The audiobook editions of Dickens's novels carry on that tradition magnificently. Narrators bring his vast casts of characters, his comic set pieces, and his dramatic climaxes to vivid life. Dickens's prose — written to be read aloud, with its rhythmic sentences and theatrical dialogue — is ideally suited to the audio format, and many listeners find the audiobooks the most enjoyable way to experience his work. Dickens died in 1870 at the age of fifty-eight, leaving behind a body of work that has never gone out of fashion. His books and audiobooks remain essential — timeless stories of love, loss, justice, and redemption told by a writer whose genius for storytelling has never been surpassed.

A BBC Christmas

A Tale of Two Cities

BBC Classics

The Going Public … in Shorts Series

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