Charles Dickens

Red brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Reason, facts, and statistics. This is the world of Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens's most powerful and unforgettable novels. The highest priority for Thomas Gradgrind, head of the Gradgrind model...

Charles Dickens' classic story, A Tale of Two Cities, is set before and during the French Revolution. The people are divided not only by class but by war. It shows the cruelty shown by both sides of French society toward one another and compares these acts to those happening in London in the...

‘It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature.’ Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers was a huge success at the time of publication, and helped launch Dickens as the literary...

In the 1840s Charles Dickens wrote five short stories with strong social and moral messages. "The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In" is the second of these stories, whose predecessor was the famous "A Christmas Carol". "The Chimes" focuses on Trotty...

A charming novella by Charles Dickens first published in 1848. It is the fifth and last of Dickens' Christmas novellas. The story is more about the spirit of the holidays than about the holidays themselves, harking back to the first in the series, A Christmas Carol. The tale centers on a...

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” So begins one of Charles Dickens’ most enduring and powerful works. A Tale of Two Cities sweeps listeners into the turmoil of the French Revolution, capturing both the grandeur and the horror of the era. Set between the contrasting...

Assembled and edited by Julian Hawthorne and first published in 1907, the Old Time English volume of The Lock and Key Library features ten classic mysteries and ghost stories by Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas de Quincey, Charles Robert Maturin, Laurence Sterne, and William...

In the polluted and poverty-ridden Coketown, Louisa and Tom Gradgrind endure a cold and loveless childhood at the hands of their self-satisfied and unimaginative father Thomas. Starved of affection, Louisa is forced into a miserable marriage with the self-made industrialist Josiah Bounderby...

Wealthy and old, Martin Chuzzlewit, Sr. is surrounded by greedy relatives hoping to obtain a portion of his estate upon his death. Of his two descendants, born and bred in the same heritage of selfishness, one, Martin Jr., has the good fortune to transform, while the other, Jonas, does not and...

Lorsqu'en 1850 il publie David Copperfield, Charles Dickens offre à ses lecteurs le premier roman qu'il ait écrit à la première personne, et, derrière l'histoire de son jeune héros, c'est aussi parfois la sienne qu'on peut lire. Mais ce que dessinent surtout les douloureuses premières...

Set in London's backstreet slums, Oliver Twist is the story of a workhouse orphan captured and thrust into a den of thieves, where some of Dickens' most depraved villains preside: the incorrigible Artful Dodger; the barbarous bully Bill Sikes; and the terrible Fagin, whose knavery threatens to...

This is a full-cast recording of Charles Dickens’ classic holiday favorite A Christmas Carol, the tale of miserly old Ebenezer Scrooge. It is Christmas Eve, and the air outside is as cold as Scrooge’s heart. Come nightfall, Scrooge receives three visitors: the ghosts of Christmas Past...

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (commonly known as The Pickwick Papers) is the first novel by Charles Dickens. The book became the first real publishing phenomenon, with bootleg copies, theatrical performances, Sam Weller joke books and other merchandise. Written for publication as a...

David Copperfield erzählt im Rückblick seine Lebensgeschichte von der Kindheit an bis zum erfolgreichen Schriftsteller mit Familie. Die vier Etappen sind: Kindheit, Ausbildung, Beruf und Ehe mit Dora, Neuanfang mit Agnes. Damit verbunden sind mehrere teilweise tragische ...

Oliver Twist doesn't ask for much—just a little more. When a hungry orphan speaks up, he's hurled from the workhouse into London's maze of alleys, where charm comes cheap and danger wears a friendly grin.

The Seven Poor Travellers takes place on Christmas Eve in Rochester at the charity hospice founded in 1579 by Richard Watts - an actual hospice that Dickens knew well from his childhood days. According to Watts' will, his hospice was to supply six poor travelers (providing they were not rogues...

Eleven-year-old actor Eden Giuliano presents a brand new line of exciting children’s stories from Icon! A Christmas Carol is a novella by the great Charles Dickens, first published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843 and illustrated by John Leech. A Christmas Carol recounts the story of...

A holiday classic by Charles Dickens. Originally published in 1843, Dickens worried about the disparity between the wealthy and the impoverished, and it was his attempt to bring this disparity into the light of day, to appeal to the die-hard capitalists to take care of the downtrodden masses...

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Julian Rhind-Tutt, star of Green Wing, also known for his roles in The Madness of King George and Tomb Raider. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Richard Maxwell. After eighteen years as a political prisoner in...

Born in a workhouse and sold into an apprenticeship with an undertaker, young orphan Oliver Twist escapes and travels through London. While on his adventure, he meets Jack Dawkins, a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin. Caught in a life of immorality...