Ghost Stories, Charles Dickens
Ghost Stories, Charles Dickens
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Ghost Stories

Author: Charles Dickens

Narrator: David Timson

Unabridged: 16 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/01/2018

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories


Synopsis

Charles Dickens was a master of the macabre. His stories of madness, murder and revenge, often imbued with a sympathetic moral undertone, have continued to thrill and chill readers ever since they were written. Here then are 15 tales that display the full range of Dickens' Gothic talents. "The Signalman," perhaps the most well-known, is a chilling story about a mysterious figure and its deathly omen; "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain" shows the consequences for those who make deals with the dead; "The Portrait-Painter's Story" follows an artist who paints a non-living person by memory; and "Captain Murderer and the Devil's Bargain," a bedtime story from Dickens' own childhood, tells of a bloodthirsty man who kills his brides and bakes them into pies. Among others, the collection also includes "A Christmas Carol," "The Baron of Grogzwig" from "The Pickwick Papers," and "The Ghost in the Bride's Chamber," a novella co-written with Wilkie Collins.

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 Peter on December 06, 2019

A first person narrator meets a mysterious signal man who tells him he sees a spectre appearing every time something bad happens. The signal man is downcast because he couldn't any train accidents shown by the spectre. One time the signal man is missing as our first person narrator wants to see him.......more

Goodreads review by Bionic Jean on April 13, 2025

Charles Dickens’s The Signal-Man is a well-nigh perfect ghost story: one of my favourite stories of all time. It has a disjointed, eerie feel right from the start, with unearthly events which are inexplicable without recourse to the supernatural. There is a sense of dislocation, and foreboding heigh......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on November 13, 2022

Having only just discovered that Charles 'The Word Wizard' Dickens was the person who coined the term "butterfingers", I remembered that this pocket-sized ghost story was still waiting patiently for me in the wings. And, knowing that an hour spent in the company of Dickens is never an hour wasted, I......more

Goodreads review by karen on December 05, 2018

charles dickens wrote about one billion christmas stories; enough to populate both A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire AND Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire, and doubtless more than are included there. big on christmas, that dickens was. and yet this story, originally published in......more

Goodreads review by Imme on April 28, 2024

|| 3.0 stars || Oh, how creepy! This story follows a man who says he is being haunted by a ghost who keeps warning him before terrible tragedy strikes. The man is beside himself because the ghost appeared before him again, and he now fears danger is looming ahead. Yet, the man does not know how to st......more