Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens - AudioBook CD
Brand New : Unabridged 25 Audio CDs 31.5 Hours
The most gorgeously theatrical of all Dickens’s novels, Nicholas Nickleby follows the delightful adventures of a hearty young hero in nineteenth-century England. Nicholas, a gentleman's son fallen upon hard times, must set out to make his way in the world. His journey is accompanied by some of the most swaggering scoundrels and unforgettable eccentrics in Dickens’s pantheon.
From the dungeon-like Yorkshire boys’ boarding school run by the cruel Wackford Squeers to the high-spirited stage of Vincent Crummles’s extraordinary acting troupe, Nicholas Nickleby is a triumph of the imagination, bursting with color, humor, and poignant social commentary.
About the Author Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens, FRSA pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era, as well as a vigorous social campaigner. Critics George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton championed Dickens's mastery of prose, his endless invention of unique, clever personalities, and his powerful social sensibilities, but fellow writers such as George Henry Lewes, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf faulted his work for sentimentality, implausible occurrences, and grotesque characterizations. The popularity of Dickens's novels and short stories has meant that they have never gone out of print. Many of Dickens's novels first appeared in periodicals and magazines in serialised form—a popular format for fiction at the time—and, unlike many other authors who completed entire novels before serial production commenced, Dickens often composed his works in parts, in the order in which they were meant to appear. Such a practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by one minor "cliffhanger" after another, to keep the public looking forward to the next installment.
In 1834, Dickens became a political journalist, reporting on parliamentary debate and travelling across Britain by stagecoach to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle. His journalism, in the form of sketches which appeared in periodicals from 1833, formed his first collection of pieces Sketches by Boz which was published in 1836 and led to the serialization of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in March 1836. He continued to contribute to and edit journals throughout much of his subsequent literary career. Dickens's keen perceptiveness, intimate knowledge and understanding of the people, and tale-spinning genius were quickly to gain him world renown and wealth.
On 2 April 1836, he married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816 – 1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they set up home in Bloomsbury. They had ten children. Catherine's sister Mary entered Charles Dickens's Doughty Street household to offer support to her newly married sister and brother-in-law. It was not unusual for a woman's unwed sister to live with and help a newly married couple. Charles Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died after a brief illness in his arms in 1837. She became a character in many of his books, and her death is fictionalized as the death of Little Nell. Also in 1836, Charles Dickens accepted the job of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position that he would hold for three years, when he fell out with the owner. At the same time, his success as a novelist continued, producing Oliver Twist (1837–39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop and, finally, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840–41)—all published in monthly instalments before being made into books. Charles Dickens had a pet raven named Grip which, when it died in 1841, Charles Dickens had stuffed (it is now at the Free Library of Philadelphia). Charles Dickens made two trips to North America. In 1842, he travelled with his wife to the United States and Canada, a journey which was successful in spite of his support for the abolition of slavery. He called upon President John Tyler at the White House.[citation needed] At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Charles Dickens household to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until her brother-in-law's death in 1870.
During this visit, Charles Dickens spent time in New York City, where he gave lectures, raised support for copyright laws, and recorded many of his impressions of America. He toured the City for a month, and met such luminaries as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. On 14 February 1842, a Boz Ball (named after his pseudonym) was held in his honour at the Park Theater, with 3,000 of New York’s elite present. Among the neighbourhoods he visited were Five Points, Wall Street, The Bowery, and the prison known as The Tombs. The trip is described in the short travelogue American Notes for General Circulation and is also the basis of some of the episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit. Shortly thereafter, he began to show interest in Unitarian Christianity, although he remained an Anglican, at least nominally, for the rest of his life. Charles Dickens's work continued to be popular, especially A Christmas Carol written in 1843, the first of his Christmas books, which was reputedly a potboiler written in a matter of weeks to meet the expenses of his wife's fifth pregnancy. After living briefly abroad in Italy (1844) and Switzerland (1846), Charles Dickens continued his success with Dombey and Son (1848); David Copperfield (1849–50); Bleak House (1852–53); Hard Times (1854); Little Dorrit (1857); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); and Great Expectations (1861). Charles Dickens was also the publisher and editor of, and a major contributor to, the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870). A recurring theme in Charles Dickens's writing, both as reportage for these publications and as an inspiration for his fiction, reflected the public's interest in Arctic exploration: the heroic friendship between explorers John Franklin and John Richardson gave the idea for A Tale of Two Cities, The Wreck of the Golden Mary and the play The Frozen Deep.[15] After Franklin died in unexplained circumstances on an expedition to find the North West Passage it was natural for Charles Dickens to write a piece in Household Words defending his hero against the discovery in 1854, some four years after the search began, of evidence that Franklin's men had, in their desperation, resorted to cannibalism. Without adducing any supporting evidence he speculates that, far from resorting to cannibalism amongst themselves, the members of the expedition may have been "set upon and slain by the Esquimaux...We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel." Although publishing in a subsequent issue of Household Words a defence of the Esquimaux, from another author who had actually visited the scene of the supposed cannibalism, Charles Dickens refused to alter his view. |
