The Complete Charles Dickens Christma..., Charles Dickens
The Complete Charles Dickens Christma..., Charles Dickens
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The Complete Charles Dickens Christmas Collection

Author: Charles Dickens

Narrator: Geoffrey Giuliano And The Camden Towne Players

Unabridged: 16 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/19/2021


Synopsis

Charles Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognized him as a literary genius. After the success of A Christmas Carol in 1843 Dickens continued the series throughout the 1840s, maintaining what he called "the Carol philosophy" to "strike a sledgehammer blow" for the poor, uneducated, and repressed. In typical fashion he drove his message home with a mixture of humor and good cheer. Although subsequent Christmas books sold well at the time of their initial release, they have not enjoyed the staying power of A Christmas Carol. The Christmas books, particularly The Chimes, the Cricket, and the Carol, were the centerpiece of Dickens' public reading tours in the 1850s and 60s with A Christmas Carol far and away the most popular with audiences. Dickens discontinued the Christmas books after The Haunted Man, devoting his time to the publication of weekly magazines, Household Words (1850-1858) and All the Year Round (1859-1867), in which he included annual Christmas stories. Henceforth Dickens was forever linked with the celebration of Christmas. We present them here as a special Icon classic five audiobook collection.

Copyright Eden Garret Giuliano, 2021

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 Becky on December 24, 2019

"A Christmas Carol" is always a fun read, but after reading this book I can see why Dickens' other Christmas stories didn't receive the rave reviews the former did. "The Chimes" is similar to "A Christmas Carol," sort of like he wrote the former first and when it failed he edited it into the latter......more

Goodreads review by Madeleine on December 18, 2016

För mig fungerar inte Dickens som ljudbok. Tycker att det var svårt att hitta fokus och att förstå händelseförloppet. Jag som annars älskar Dickens! Kanske är det språket som sätter upp hinder för mig? Men då vet jag det. Då har jag i alla fall provat.......more

Goodreads review by Cody on February 27, 2013

It was an interesting book, but I don't plan on reading it again.......more