A House to Let, Charles Dickens
A House to Let, Charles Dickens
List: $6.00 | Sale: $4.21
Club: $3.00

A House to Let

Author: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide Ann Proctor

Narrator: Michael Ward

Unabridged: 5 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/25/2018

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

"A House to Let" is a short story by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter. It was originally published in 1858 in the Christmas edition of Dickens' Household Words magazine. Collins wrote the introduction and collaborated with Dickens on the second story and ending, while Gaskell and Proctor wrote the remainder.

When elderly Sophonisba moves to London for a change of tone, she notices something unusual about the supposedly unoccupied house to let across the street. She entreaties her friends and confidants to investigate the matter, and they return with a collection of tales of previous occupants, but what exactly is the secret of the mysterious house to let?

Narrated by Michael Ward

About Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England, where his father was a naval pay clerk. When he was five, the family moved to Chatham, near Rochester, another port town. He received some education at a small private school but this was curtailed when his father's fortunes declined.

When Dickens was ten, the family moved to Camden Town, and this proved the beginning of a long, difficult period. When he had just turned twelve, Dickens was sent to work for a manufacturer of boot blacking, where for the better part of a year he labored for ten hours a day, an unhappy experience that instilled him with a sense of having been abandoned by his family. Around the same time Dickens's father was jailed for debt in the Marshalsea Prison, where he remained for fourteen weeks. After some additional schooling, Dickens worked as a clerk in a law office and taught himself shorthand; this qualified him to begin working in 1831 as a reporter in the House of Commons, where he became known for the speed with which he took down speeches.

By 1833 Dickens was publishing humorous sketches of London life in the Monthly Magazine, which were collected in book form as Sketches by "Boz". These were followed by the publication in installments of the comic adventures that became The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, whose unprecedented popularity made the twenty-five-year-old author a national figure. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, who would bear him ten children over a period of fifteen years. Dickens's energies enabled him to lead an active family and social life, including an indulgence in elaborate amateur theatricals, while maintaining a literary productiveness of astonishing proportions. He characteristically wrote his novels for serial publication and was himself the editor of many of the periodicals in which they appeared, including Bentley's Miscellany, the Daily News, Household Words, and All the Year Round. Among his close associates were his future biographer John Forster and the younger Wilkie Collins, with whom he collaborated on fictional and dramatic works. In rapid succession he published Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge, sometimes working on several novels simultaneously.

Dickens's celebrity led to a tour of the United States in 1842. There he met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and other literary figures, and was received with an enthusiasm that was dimmed somewhat by the criticisms Dickens expressed in his American Notes and in the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit. The appearance of A Christmas Carol in 1843 sealed his position as the most widely popular writer of his time; it became an annual tradition for him to write a story for the season, of which the most memorable were The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth. He continued to produce novels at only a slightly diminished rate, publishing Dombey and Son in 1848 and David Copperfield in 1850.

From this point on, his novels tended to be more elaborately constructed and harsher and less buoyant in tone than his earlier works. These late novels include Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865, was his last completed novel and perhaps the most somber and savage of them all. Dickens had separated from his wife in 1858-he had become involved a year earlier with a young actress named Ellen Ternan-and the ensuing scandal had alienated him from many of his former associates and admirers. He was weakened by years of overwork and by a near-fatal railroad disaster during the writing of Our Mutual Friend. Nevertheless, he embarked on a series of public readings, including a return visit to America in 1867, which further eroded his health. A final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a crime novel much influenced by Wilkie Collins, was left unfinished upon his death on June 9,1870, at the age of 58.


Reviews

Goodreads review by A.E. on December 28, 2022

Four Victorian authors, including Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, teamed up for this bumpy but enjoyable novella. The contributions from Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Proctor were the most powerful for me.......more

Goodreads review by Benjamin on June 15, 2024

A House to Let, at less than 100 pages, a collaboration between four 19th century authors which originally appeared as the Christmas edition of Charles Dickens’ weekly magazine, Household Words, in 1858. 6 chapters, each organized as a short story anthology. 1. The pitch is that an elderly lady named......more

Goodreads review by Monica. on December 10, 2017

Lavoro a quattro mani, e che mani! Charles Dickens si avvale di collaboratori e amici per scrivere questa breve storia da pubblicare durante il periodo natalizio. Si tratta del primo esperimento compiuto da questo team di autori a cui fece seguito Le stanze dei fantasmi. Ho apprezzato maggiormente que......more

Goodreads review by Rebecca on April 21, 2017

A good story. Narrated in a most endearing way.......more

Goodreads review by Sara Booklover on February 09, 2025

Un romanzo scritto a quattro mani da quattro grandi scrittori inglesi ottocenteschi, che hanno unito le loro forze per dare vita a una vicenda che ruota attorno una casa misteriosa, rimasta sfitta per ignoti motivi. Ho amato l’originalità della struttura narrativa del libro, composta da una storia pr......more