Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (Level 3)

Pip's life changes when he is provided with money by a secret benefactor and he goes to London to live as a gentleman. He thinks he will now be able to marry the woman he loves. But Pip's "great expectations" do not turn out as he hoped.

 

LEVEl: Intermediate

TEXT: English, Russian

AUDIO: English, Russian

Bleak House

Bleak HouseA complex plot of love and inheritance is set against the English legal system of the mid-19th century, with all its tortuous avenues and disguised resolutions. Here is the firm, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the young orphan and ward of court Ester Summerson (who tells much of the story). As always, it is the skilled pen of Dickens himself that creates the momentum with his acute eye for both individual characters and their traits, and the backdrop of Victorian London.

 

Charles Dickens - Little Dorrit
[Unabridged audiobook with text]

 

Little Dorrit is a serial novel by Charles Dickens published originally between 1855 and 1857. It is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period.

 

Charles Dickens - The Mystery of Edwin Drood

[BBC Radio drama]

 

First published as a monthly serial in 1870, only six of the planned twelve installments were published before Dickens' death left the story unfinished, and readers have often speculated how it might have ended.

This 1990 radio adaptation uses the ending written by Leon Garfield in 1980.

 

Dickens and Popular Entertainment

Dickens and Popular Entertainment is the first extended study of this vital aspect of Dickens' life and work. Ranging widely through showmen's memoirs, playbills, advertisements, journals, drawings and imaginative literature, Paul Schlicke explores the ways in which Dickens channelled his love of entertainment into incomparable artistry. Circus, fair, theatre and street performances provided the novelist with subject matter and with the sources of imaginative stimulus essential to his art.