Charles Dickens: A Life (CD-Audio) By (author) Claire Tomalin, Narrator Alex Jennings

Full bibliographic data for Charles Dickens

Title

Charles Dickens

Subtitle

A Life

Authors and contributors

By (author) Claire Tomalin, Narrator Alex Jennings

Physical properties

Format: CD-Audio
Width: 135 mm
Height: 190 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight: 74 g

Audience

General/trade

Language

English

ISBN

ISBN 13: 9781452658643
ISBN 10: 1452658641

Classifications

BISAC category code: BIO006000
LC classification: D
BICMainSubject: BG
BISAC category code: BIO007000
Nielsen BookScan Product Class: T4.0
Dewey: B

Edition

Unabridged

Edition statement

Unabridged

Publisher

Tantor Media, Inc

Imprint name

Tantor Media, Inc

Publication date

18 June 2012

Publication City/Country

Old Saybrook, CT/US

Review quote

"Claire Tomalin's clear and brutally honest portrayal combined with Alex Jennings's smooth voice and intelligent, engaging style results in a superb listening experience." ---AudioFile Earphones Award Winner

Biographical note

Claire Tomalin is the author of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Whitbread Biography Award, and the Samuel Pepys Award, and dubbed "invaluable" by the New York Review of Books. She is a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Wordsworth Trust, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a vice president of English PEN. Alex Jennings is an associate actor with the RSC and has also worked with the Royal National Theatre. He has won two Olivier Awards for Best Actor in a Musical, and his TV appearances include The State Within and Inspector Morse. An AudioFile Earphones Award winner, he is a prolific reader of audiobooks, the most notable of which are The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis and Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist.

Main description

When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring crowds to his public appearances, had met presidents and princes, and had amassed a fortune.Like a hero from his novels, Dickens trod a hard path to greatness. Born into a modest middle-class family, his young life was overturned when his profligate father was sent to debtors' prison and Dickens was forced into harsh and humiliating factory work. Yet through these early setbacks he developed his remarkable eye for all that was absurd, tragic, and redemptive in London life. He set out to succeed, and with extraordinary speed and energy made himself into the greatest English novelist of the century.Years later Dickens's daughter wrote to the author George Bernard Shaw, "If you could make the public understand that my father was not a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch, you would greatly oblige me." Seen as the public champion of household harmony, Dickens tore his own life apart, betraying, deceiving, and breaking with friends and family while he pursued an obsessive love affair.Charles Dickens: A Life gives full measure to Dickens's heroic stature-his huge virtues both as a writer and as a human being- while observing his failings in both respects with an unblinking eye. Renowned literary biographer Claire Tomalin crafts a story worthy of Dickens's own pen, a comedy that turns to tragedy as the very qualities that made him great-his indomitable energy, boldness, imagination, and showmanship-finally destroyed him. The man who emerges is one of extraordinary contradictions, whose vices and virtues were intertwined as surely as his life and his art.