Audiobook · read by volunteers
Charles Dickens
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)
Read by Stuart Bell, Laura Caldwell, Anna Simon, Chrystal Layton, Justin Brett, Ray Clare, Tysto, Dick Durette, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014) · 12 chapters · 7 h 30
About the book
G. K. Chesterton loved Charles Dickens, and this book is a long, joyful argument for why. Rather than a dry biography, it is a portrait written in Chesterton’s unmistakable style, full of surprises and paradox. He begins with the age that shaped the novelist, follows the boyhood and the youth, and goes on to defend Dickens against critics who found him vulgar or sentimental. For Chesterton, Dickens was a creator of characters so vivid that they seem to live outside the books, and a champion of ordinary people. He explains what makes the novels tick, from the comedy to the cheerfulness, and why they still matter. Twelve chapters, read by nine LibriVox volunteers, run for about seven and a half hours, a lively companion for anyone who loves Dickens or enjoys Chesterton.
Introduction
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who lived from 1874 to 1936, was an English journalist, essayist, poet and novelist, famous for his wit and for his taste for paradox. Chesterton had already written studies of Robert Browning and G. F. Watts, and Charles Dickens, published in 1906, is his book-length tribute to a novelist he greatly admired, written in the high-spirited, paradoxical manner that made him famous.
The book falls into the categories of biography and literary criticism, although it does not follow the pattern of either in a conventional way. Chesterton is less concerned with dates and documents than with the spirit of his subject. The opening chapters deal with the Dickens period, the boyhood and the youth of the novelist, and they set the writer in the society that produced him. Later chapters turn to the novels themselves and to the qualities that Chesterton found in them, among them their generosity, their humour and their sense of wonder at the common life of London.
Readers should know that this is an appreciation, not a neutral study, and that Chesterton’s judgments are strongly stated. Some of his facts have been corrected by later scholarship, but the book remains admired as a piece of writing and as a defence of an author who was sometimes undervalued by critics.
The recording has twelve chapters, shared among nine LibriVox volunteers, and lasts about seven and a half hours. It is worth hearing today by lovers of Dickens, who will find reasons to return to him, and by anyone who enjoys the energy of Chesterton’s prose.
Public domain
G. K. Chesterton died in 1936: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text