‘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...

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...

‘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...

"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...

Nicholas Nickleby' combines comedy and tragedy in a tale of triumph over adversity, where Nickleby succeeds despite social injustice, in a story that mirrors Dickens' own rise from poverty to...

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...

Miriam Margolyes reads ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens.

Ebenezer Scrooge refuses to accept that Christmas is a time for peace and goodwill to all men. Whilst those less...

John Harmon, in exile for many years, discovers that by a curious quirk in his father's will he must marry Bella Wilfer, a girl he has never met, in order to claim his inheritance. Mistakenly...