List $89.98

Written by Charles Dickens - Audio book performed by Anton Lesser

Unabridged Fiction - 15 COMPACT DISCS - 19 hours, 9 minutes

Publisher, Naxos Audiobooks (August 2007)

Listen to MP3 audio clip 1.

Narrated in the first person, Great Expectations tells the story of Philip Pirrip (known as Pip) from his disadvantaged start as an orphan in the Kent marshes to the improvement in his position following an anonymous allowance. Pip moves to London where, only after many trials, does he learn humility and the value of loyalty. Key Dickens characters abound – the convict Magwitch, the eccentric Miss Havisham and the pompous Pumblechook.

Great Expectations was first published as a complete novel in October 1861 shortly after its serialisation in All The Year Round. Like David Copperfield, it drew on his early life, especially the trials of a boy who, about to enter his teen years, find himself challenged by tough life experiences. Among the many remarkable scenes is the famous meeting with Miss Havisham, surrounded by the mementos of her wedding day many years before.

Great Expectations remains one of Dickens’ most popular novels.

The abridged version of Great Expectations, released in the first year of Naxos AudioBooks, won one of the leading awards in the UK, and quite rightly so. During the award ceremony, the opening, with the remarkable contrasting voices of Pip and Magwitch held the audience spellbound. Ever since then, Anton has been keen to record the work complete and, at last, here it is.

Anton lives in an Oxfordshire village, not far from Stratford, and, fortunately, not far is Hatsoff Studio, which, though also placed in a sweet English country village, is ideally appointed for recording the classics. Often, when Anton is starring in a Shakespeare play at Stratford, he will go to Hatsoff on his free days (and sometimes on his performance days!) and record Homer or Dickens for Naxos AudioBooks.

After The Iliad and The Odyssey, Anton was only too glad to turn to the more familiar milieu of nineteenth century England with the strong characterisation that he loves to present. Great Expectations is a book he has a special affection for, and it shows in the recording!

About the Author: Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born at Landport, then a little suburb of Portsmouth, on Friday 7 February 1812. His father was John Dickens, a clerk in the navy pay-office, and at that time attached to Portsmouth dockyard; in 1814 he was transferred to London, and in 1816 to Chatham, where the boy, already a great reader, got some schooling. In 1821 the family fell into trouble; reforms in the Admiralty deprived the father of his post and the greater part of his income; they had to leave Chatham, and went to London, where they lived in a mean house in Camden Town. But not for long. The father was arrested for debt and consigned to the Marshalsea, and Charles, then only ten years old, and small for his age, was placed in a blacking factory at Hungerford Market, where he labeled the blacking bottles, with other poor boys. Not only were his days passed in this wretched work , but the child was left entirely to himself at night, when he had four miles to walk to his lonely bedroom in Camden Town. On Sundays he visited his father in the prison; and presently they found him a lodging in Lant Street close by. On his father’s release they all went back to Camden Town and the boy was sent again to school, an academy in the Hampstead Road for three to four years. When he was taken from school no better place could be found for him than a stool at the desk of a solicitor. Meanwhile, however, his father had obtained a post as reporter for the Morning Herald, and Charles resolved, also, to attempt the profession of journalist. He taught himself shorthand and frequented the British Museum daily to supplement some of the shortcomings in his reading. In his seventeenth year he became a reporter at Doctor’s Commons; but all his ambitions at this time were for the stage. It was not until he was twenty-two that he succeeded in getting permanent employment on the staff of a London paper as a reporter. In this capacity he was sent about the country a great deal. In December 1833 the Monthly Magazine published his Dinner at Poplar Walk Other papers followed but produced nothing for the contributor except the gratification of seeing them in print. However, they did Dickens the best service by enabling him to prove his ability and he soon made arrangements to contribute papers and sketches regularly to the Evening Chronicle, continuing to act as reporter for the Morning Chronicle, and getting his salary increased from five guineas to seven a week. The Sketches by Boz were published in the beginning of 1836, the author receiving £150 for the copyright; he afterwards bought it back for eleven times that amount. In March that same year appeared the first number of The Pickwick Papers; three days afterwards Dickens married Catherine, the daughter of his friend George Hogarth, the editor of the Evening Chronicle. She bore him seven sons and three daughters between 1837 and 1852, three of whom, predeceased him; in 1858 husband and wife separated. Success having come his way Dickens allowed himself no rest. In fulfillment of publisher’s engagements he produced Oliver Twist (1837–39, in Bentley’s Miscellany which Dickens edited for a time), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) and Master Humphrey’s Clock, a serial miscellany which resolved itself into two stories, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). Thereafter a great part of Dickens’ life was spent abroad, especially notable being his visits to America in 1842 and 1867–68, his stay in Genoa in 1844–45 and at Lausanne in 1846 and his summers spent in Boulogne in 1853, 1854 and 1856. Meanwhile there came from his pen an incessant stream: American Notes (1842), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), The Christmas Tales – viz. A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1843, 1846 and 1848); Pictures from Italy (1845), Dombey and Son (1846–48), David Copperfield (1849–50), Bleak House (1852–53), The Child’s History of England (1854), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855–57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), The Uncommercial Traveller (1861), the Christmas numbers in Household Words and All the Year Round, Great Expectations (1860–61), Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870, unfinished). To this long roll must be added public readings (1858–70), both in this country and in America, private theatricals, speeches, letters innumerable, pamphlets, plays, the conduct of a popular magazine – first (1850) called Household Words and then (1859) All the Year Round. Nevertheless he had taken irreparable toll of his vitality, and he died suddenly on 9 June 1870 at Gadshill, near Rochester (the place he had coveted as a boy and purchased in 1856), and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The general style of Dickens was virile and direct. He had full command English, reinforced by sympathy and humour, by drollery as refreshing as it was unexpected and by a fierce indignation against wrong. Critically his work is easily assailed, but of its popularity there can be no doubt, for it has conquered the whole English-speaking world.

About the Performers: Anton Lesser has played many of the principal Shakespearean roles for the RSC and performed contemporary drama, notably The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. Appearances on TV include The Cherry Orchard, The Mill on the Floss and The Politician’s Wife.