Philip Pirrip –or ‘Pip’ – has ‘great expectations’. An orphan, brought up in a small village on the Essex marshes by his sharp-tongued sister and her husband Joe Gargery, the gentle...

Born and raised in the workhouse, orphan Oliver Twist’s life is miserable. When he is taken on as an apprentice by Mr Sowerby the undertaker, he hopes things will get better, but Sowerby’s...

In tracing the parish boy's progress, Dickens did not write a topical satire on the workhouse system and the role of the 1834 New Poor Law in fostering criminality, he created a story about the...

In the polluted and poverty-ridden Coketown, Louisa and Tom Gradgrind endure a cold and loveless childhood at the hands of their self-satisfied and unimaginative father Thomas. Starved of...

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" The opening words of Charles Dickens' great French Revolution romance set the scene for a heart-stopping historical adventure that dashes back...

Charles Dickens' classic novel stars Alex Jennings as Charles Dickens and Pauline Quirke as Mrs Boffin. Adapted by Mike Walker.Following his father's death, John Harmon returns to London to...

Pip is an orphan, brought up by his sister and her husband, the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery. One evening, while visiting his parents' graves, he has a shocking encounter with an escaped convict...

When orphan Pip meets the escaped convict Magwitch in an overgrown churchyard on the Kent marshes, little does he know that the incident will change his life forever. Some years later, now...

‘Hard Times’ is Dickens’s powerful and withering portrait of a Lancashire mill town in the 1840s... In the persons of Gradgrind and Bounderby he stigmatised the prevalent philosophy of...

In this BBC Radio adaptation of Peter Ackroyd's spectacular one-man show, Simon Callow portrays both Charles Dickens and many of his best-loved characters, from Mr Micawber and Bill Sikes to...

‘Like all fathers,’ said Dickens, ‘I have a favourite child, and his name is David Copperfield.’ He is the favourite, too, of many listeners.

The story follows the trials and...

Charles Dickens Classic Radio Dramas

The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has ground its way through the courts for generations. At its heart are Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, who find love - and terrible loss - through their...

Writer Frances Fyfield uses the manuscript of Dickens's last, unfinished, novel to work on the mystery of what happened to the book's eponymous hero Edwin Drood. First broadcast: BBC Radio 4, 19...

Born and raised in the workhouse, orphan Oliver Twist’s life is miserable. When he is taken on as an apprentice by Mr Sowerby the undertaker, he hopes things will get better, but Sowerby’s...