Charles Dickens Books

Enjoyed these very much. Will listen to them again and again over the years. Dickens is my favorite author and the readers are very good at doing multiple characters.

For afficianados who long for an faithful audio version of some of Dicken's greatest works, the Penquin Audiobook version is a welcome treasure. The collection which includes Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol, is as true to the original as an abridged version can be. The narrators include Alex Jennings, whose rendition of Fagin in Oliver Twist is unlike any you are likely to hear. Be warned, however, those whose ears are not attuned to the Victorian dialects of London are apt to struggle with these wonderful adaptations of these Dicken's classics. For an imaginative journey back to Dicken's London, this collection is just the ticket.

Which home does not have Dickens on their shelves? We have sought to have our children learn from the great thinkers of all times and truly Dickens is one the greatest! This collection is a must. Not only is it Dickens, but Alex Jennings is fantastic as he reads with such life and vigor! It is nice and relaxing to let him do the reading...his example challenges the children to want to read LIKE him! Plus, you will find that you can expose your children to the great works of literature while you are busy on the go! We have used these tapes during the holidays for A Christmas Carol as we were busily taking care of all the "have-to-do's." Dickens added spice to our holidays. Plus, in this collection you also get to enter into the world of little Oliver Twist...my children wanted to adopt him! David Copperfield quickly became another part of our lives as well! Do not miss this classic collection...it will become part of your family as you introduce them to the great thoughts of one of the greatest thinkers of all times!

Fred Levit's book is far and away the most helpful and complete Dickens glossary I've been able to find anywhere. I work with high school students who read at various points A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations and David Copperfield. Dickens's vocabulary is one of the most extensive of any author's, and it isn't hard for a student to wind up with at best a foggy idea of what's going on at key points, and at worst in a state of total bewilderment, slogging blindly through the swamp. Earlier dictionaries and glossaries we found ranged from completely unhelpful to mildly helpful. With this impeccably researched glossary as a guide, students are now able to navigate the material with a far greater degree of certainty, not to mention a tremendously enhanced appreciation for the richness of the language. I thought I was fairly knowledgeable on the subject myself until I started cross-checking some of my earlier assumptions. My own love for Dickens increased correspondingly. The book gets an A+. No reader of Dickens should be without it.

A glossary that's fun to read. Contains words and expressions that I've not been able to find in any dictionary. Makes reading Dickens an even greater pleasure!

Why do I come here to "review" this? It isn't anyone's book club selection, no. But tonight I want to talk about this incomparably rich and wonderful book, and how as a fourteen year old kid I simply sank into it, taking it slowly week by week, glorying in its mysteries, its great grotesque portrait of Miss Havisham in her rotting bridal finery, its often painful recounting of a young boy's awakening to a seductive world beyond the blacksmith's forge to which destiny has condemned him. This book was about me. It was about wanting to learn, wanting to transcend, wanting to achieve while anything and everything seems hopelessly beyond one's dreams. Of course life changes for Pip. And the world Pip enters was a world that dazzled me and only made my adolescent ambitions burn all the more hurtfully. I think this book is about all who've ever tried for more, ever reached for the gold ring -- and it's about some, of course, who've gotten it. It's also a wondrous piece of storytelling, a wondrous example of how in the first person ("I am, etc." ) a character can tell you more about himself than he himself knows. What a feat. And a very strange thing about this book, too, was the fact that Dickens said more about Pip and Pip's dreams than Dickens knew he was doing. Dickens himself didn't quite realize, I don't think, the full humanity of the character he created. Yet the character is there -- alive, captivating, engaging us throughout with full sympathy. Go for it. If you never read anything else by Charles Dickens, read and experience this book. Afterwards, David Copperfield will be a ride in the sunshine, I assure you. And both books will stand by you forever. For whom am I writing this? For myself perhaps just because Pip meant and still means so much. For some one perhaps who's unsure about this book and needs a push to dive into a classic. Oh, is this book ever worth the effort. -. Enough. Read it, know it.

Pip,a poor orphan boy living with his sister and her husband, who is the village blacksmith, wishes for the new world to live life of a gentlemen in. As if an answer to his wishes, Pips learns from Mr. Jagger that he has been given an enormous quantity of money from a secret benefctor, this money is enough to live the life of a wealthy gentlemen in London. There he stayes with Herbert Pockt. When he sees Estella the girl of his dreams, the adopted girl of the rich, Miss Havisham. To find out who his benefactor and what happenes with Estelaa you have to read this truely great story for it is called "Great" "Expectatons."

Great Expectations is an exciting story dramatically done in this audio presentation.

With a top notch cast and a wonderful, well planned adaption, this easily ranks as one of BBC's best radio drama presentations. The horror, romance, and tongue-in-cheek silliness of youth are all thoroughly portrayed here. Pip is as he should be... a sympathetic but misguided character whose life is spent in the pursuit of hollow happiness.

The BBC drama does well on many levels... Sound is excellent, superb acting, all the major plot twists seem to be intact... Highly recommended!

This is the most acclaimed works of Dickens. `Great Expectations' is the biography of Philip Pirrip or Pip whose dream is to be a gentleman.Pip, the main character of the novel is an apprentice to Joe, his uncle and best friend. He is well contented till the time he gets the desire to be a gentleman. His chance comes when he is named as the beneficiary to some amount of fortune.

Dickens, in this book of his examines the human nature, how vulnerable we are to the call of money. The great author brings out how Pip makes fair-weather friends when he comes to fortune, how he forgets his roots and his good old true friend Joe. Besides that `Great Expectations' depicts also the love of Pip for a certain girl named Estella, for whose sake he wanted to be a gentleman.

If you've been asking yourself what is the meaning of true love, then read this fabulous book, it will help you to find the meaning of it to some extent. `Great Expectations' is one of those books that after reading you will feel the self-satisfaction still lingering in your heart for quite a long while.

Great plot. Very intruging. I would recommend this book to anyone who is over nine and loves classics.

Once upon a time, I had a terrible cold. I dropped by the library and took out a copy of The Old Curiosity Shop, went home, huddled in my bed for four days, and devoured it. It was the best cold I ever had! Upon returning the book I noticed there was a whole collection of Dickens put out by Oxford...lovely hardcovers with illustrations. Years went by and I saved my pennies and finally bought the entire 21 volume collection. It was the best thing I ever did for myself! Certainly worth every cent, I then continued to devour the rest of Dickens. Oxford puts out fine books, but nothing as wonderful as this collection of Charles Dickens works, which ought to reside in everyone's library. Buy it and you will begin to look forward to those colds!!

This collection is great for all those Dickens fans out there who also love illustrations. While the quality of the illustrations is not as good as can be found elsewhere, the set remains a true prize to any nineteenth-century literature-loving reader. Bite the bullet and enjoy!

This is an essential reference book for any serious student or reader of Dickens, though I would strongly recommend that one take the extra effort to obtain a copy in hardcover rather than paper. The two editions are entirely different productions. If one had held both editions on one's hand, the differences are blatant, but merely reading about them will not reveal how profoundly they vary from one another. The paperback has a single virtue: price. It is cheaper by a considerable margin. Looking at the pagination, one might imagine that the paper edition contains everything found in the hardback. The paper edition runs to 675 pages, while the hardback runs to 654. The hardback, however, in addition to being a far more attractive volume and containing some sections in a larger, more easily read typeface, contains a host of photographs, illustrations, and maps that greatly enhance the value of the volume. I would like to point out that while the hardback lists for $55.00, it can persistently be found on Amazon for far less than that. I obtained my copy remaindered on Amazon for $16.95, which is the same as the list price for the paperback.

I can't say enough about the quality of the articles in this volume. Top Dickens scholars from around the world have been recruited to write on a host of subjects, in particular on subjects that will cast light on the world in which Dickens lived and about which he wrote. Although his books are certainly not neglected, the emphasis is as much on Dickens and his world as on Dickens and his books. The goal of the book is clearly an understanding of Dickens in context, with the added belief that knowing his context will immeasurably deepen one's enjoyment and understanding of his works.

My lone complaint with the book is the book does not contain a usable index or list of characters. There is an alphabetical list of all characters in Dickens's books at the end, but such a list only tells you what work a character appears in, not who they are. If you are dipping back into a novel of Dickens with the intent of enjoying a chapter or two (as opposed to rereading the entire work from beginning to end), one might not remember whom a particular individual is. It would have been nice to have a one or two line explanation of whom each character is, in addition to what work in which they appeared. I believe this would have enhanced the value of this as a reference work.

The inherent problem of any reference work like this will be the degree to which it is usable. There is a host of information, but how can it be accessed and recovered? This volume suffers to some degree, but Paul Schlicke has gone to great lengths to multiply the number of aides to teasing out the book's information. The articles are organized alphabetically, but there is a wealth of indexes. There is, for instance, a "Classified Contents List," that has headings such as "Dickens's Reputation," and subheadings under that like "Critics and scholars of Dickens" and "Scholarly and critical approaches to Dickens," with titles of articles under each. By reading those articles, one finds the information one needs. There is some overlap with the book's index (which tends to refer to article titles rather than page numbers--perhaps that was in order to accommodate both the hardback and paperback editions, which have different pagination) and the "Classified Contents List," but these provide two different approaches to obtaining the information one needs.

This is not the only book on Dickens that a reader of Dickens would want to own. One would certainly want to refer to a biography by someone like Peter Ackroyd or Edgar Johnson, or perhaps a critical appreciation like that of G. K. Chesterton. But I would definitely place it on the short list of books that one would like to own.

The Oxford Readers Companion to Charles Dickens serves as an alphabetical tour of the life of the greatest novelist of the Victorian Era. With entries ranging from "A Becket, Gilbert" to "Yates, Frederick" this wonderfully engrossing reference book offers readers information about every aspect of the life, work, and historical environment in which the great man created magic. From analytical entries about every novel to biographical sketches of his friends and foes, this book truly brings Dickens to vivid and enjoyable life. No scholar of the 19th century novel should miss this comprenhensive work.

While living in the Bay Area of California we were lucky enough to have a radio station that rebroadcast Canada's CBC radio station. "The Shepherd" read by Alan Maitland was a special on Christmas Eve for a number of years and we made sure to tune in each year. Living now in an area we cannot receive the broadcast we have bought the disk and now have our own tradition playing it for ourselves and friends on Christmas Eve. Makes a wonderful gift and stocking stuffer. Recommended highly.

In Canada people start calling the CBC in early December to ask when they will broadcast the story, "The Shepherd" read on the radio by the late Alan Maitland. I suspect that much of Canada was quiet the last half hour when they just played it on Radio One.
It is a tense & beautiful spirit/ghost story about a young RAF pilot lost over the North Sea on Xmas Eve.
I highly recommend it for its expert narration, as an event for the whole family to listen to, ages 10 & up, & as just a darn good story.

The rest of the stories, each w/a bit of irony or a bittersweet taste, are well done, too.

In bookstores and libraries, literary classics are a dime a dozen. There are so many different editions available of each that the problem becomes one not of finding a good read but of selecting the edition of it that's right for you. Charles Dickens is perhaps the most popular of the past masters. All his books are enormously entertaining, whether he's writing about the tragedies of this world or its travesties. His eye for the ludicrous is faultless; his representation of it in print is perfection. He never fails to paint on the canvass in our mind, with a few simple strokes, a comic character that resembles someone we've met somewhere, sometime in our lives. His characters are so real that he needs to do nothing more than describe their appearance briefly and then let them speak for themselves. They speak with all the dignity and importance we all feel in ourselves, yet they unwittingly disclose for the reader all the foibles we all possess ... and mistakenly think known only to ourselves. Likewise, when introducing tragic characters, Dickens prefers to offer brief but unerringly accurate descriptions of their build, demeanor, and dress, and then allow their own words and actions to speak for themselves. His creations elicit mirth and misery in us without fail as Dickens masterfully plucks the strings of our hearts.

Unlike most writers, Dickens is equally at home in both the short story and the full-length novel format. This is because his novels were serialized in periodicals in their first publications. Only later were they edited for book form. "Sketches by Boz" is an offering of Dickens's first attempts at writing for a living. It consists of 56 passages, most of which can be read in a single sitting of less than half an hour. These are divided into four sections: "Our Parish", "Scenes", "Characters", and "Tales". Of these, only the last contains fiction. The 44 nonfiction accounts are just as entertaining as their made-up brothers. In fact, I found them even more fun to read at times. Dickens only thinly disguised the identities of his victims while lampooning them, and as editor Dennis Walder so rightly points out, many of these descriptions would surely result in lawsuits for libel if they were published about public figures today.

This was my first experience reading a Penguin Classics edition of Dickens, and I was extremely pleased with it. The editor introduced "Sketches" with a few notes of academic and historical interest, a particular one of which I found to be of great interest as it finally answered a question I'd had for half my life: namely, where Dickens had acquired his nickname of Boz. But more important for today's reader of Dickens is the "Notes" section at the back of the book in which Mr. Walder defines Dickensian slang and explains the author's references to people, events, and places of early nineteenth century London. Much of Dickens's wit is lost on today's reader without such disclosures.

One of my favorite ways of reading a classic author is to collect all of his or her works and then read through them at a leisurely pace in the order they were written. I did this with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with the intention of noting how his style developed over the years. I was surprised to find an unexpected benefit of that project: I was transported to those times and felt as I imagine one of Doyle's contemporary fans must have felt as he read each new Sherlock Holmes story. After finishing Doyle, I immediately began collecting Dickens for a similar project. "Sketches by Boz", being a collection of Dickens's first literary efforts, was of course the first in this series. The second Dickens book is "The Pickwick Papers", of which I have the Library of the Future edition. But after reading the Penguin Classics "Sketches", I'm determined to first replace "Pickwick" with the Penguin edition. The Penguin books are reasonably priced and well worth every penny.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is the greatest English novelist. We all know and love his novels. However, most readers do not read "Sketches by Boz" which is an early compilation of articles the budding author penned for various newspapers and journals. These sketches were written while Dickens was a parliamentary reporter in his early 20s.
Wnence does the name "Boz" derive? As a young lad Dickens gave his younger brother Augustus the nickname "Moses" in honor of a character in Oliver Goldsmith;'s classic novel "The Vicar of Wakefield." Young Augustus could not pronounce "Moses" correctly calling himself "Boz". Dickens decided this would be a good name to apply to himself as he submitted the anonymous humorous sketches he produced in profusion in the 1830s. We sometimes foget that Dickens was already an author prior to the ascension of Queen Victoria in 1837.
The Penguin edition divides the lengthy sketches into four sections:
"Sketches from our Parish:; :Scenes of London"; "Characters" and the best section "Tales" which are humorous short stories.
The book is illustrated by George Cruikshank a good friend of the author and along with Phiz one of Dickens best illustrators.
The various tales are of uneven quality. Do not read this book if you are seeking the complexity of a "Bleak House": "Little Dorrit" or "Our Mutual Friend." Do peruse them if you enjoy succinctly and well observed tales and sketches of what it was like to live in London in the 1830s as the city was becoming a vast metropolis filled with interesting characters. I loved Dickens sketches of what a London street scene was like in the bustle of early morning. His stories of life in the theatre were excellent as was his tour of Newgate prison .
If you have not read Dickens I suggest you begin with "The Pickwick Papers" and this apprentice work. Once you enter the magical, dangerous, hilarious wonderful world of Charles Dickens you will apply for citizenship papers in Mr. Dickens literary universe!

I really enjoyed this recording of A Tale of Two Cities. The reading is masterful. I will issue one warning--I bought this for a family car trip and quickly found that this recording (and maybe most Dickens) are not for the casual listener. It seems to help to have some experience with literature in general and/or with Dickens's style specifically. It wasn't easy for some members of my family to follow by ear.

I love this novel, though, and this presentation is quite good.

Anton Lesser provides a fine British accent and flair to Dickens' complete unabridged classic A Tale Of Two Cities. Here's where audio really shines, providing an award-winning Dickens reader who excels in dramatic characterizations and flair. Listen to A Tale Of Two Cities and you'll see why the written word - especially in the classics - has the ability to shine forth in audio much more than on the page.