Charles Dickens: A BBC Biography

Armando Iannucci · Melvyn Bragg · Sam West · Tess Hadley · Romesh Gunesekera · A.L. Kennedy · Alexander McCall Smith · Claire Tomalin

Oct 2021 · BBC Digital Audio · Narrated by Armando Iannucci, Melvyn Bragg, Sam West, Tess Hadley, Romesh Gunesekera, A.L. Kennedy, Alexander McCall Smith, and Claire Tomalin

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8 hr 14 min

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A BBC radio collection celebrating Charles Dickens' life, work and influence

Charles Dickens was a literary giant, second only to Shakespeare in the ranks of England's greatest writers. This extensive biographical collection looks at the man, his novels and his legacy to provide an all-round portrait of the much-loved author.

Michael Eaton's five-play cycle Dickens in London, starring Samuel Barnett, Alex Jennings and Antony Sher, explores Dickens' changing relationship with the city that fired his imagination. His numerous achievements are discussed in Great Lives: Charles Dickens (featuring Armando Iannucci and Humphrey Carpenter) and In Our Time: Dickens (featuring Melvyn Bragg and guests). Sam West reads from Dickens' letters in Words and Music: Dickens's World; Simon Watts tells how the author's 1842 visit to the US became a turning point in his career in Witness History: Dickens in America; Ian Gillan takes a tour of Dickens' old home in Pride of Place: 48 Doughty Street; and in Night Waves, Philip Dodd talks to Claire Tomalin about her definitive biography, Charles Dickens: A Life.

Literary Pursuits finds Sarah Dillon hunting for the story behind the story of Dickens' classic masterpiece, Great Expectations; and in The Mystery of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Frances Fyfield ponders what happened to the hero of Charles Dickens's final, unfinished novel? In Free Thinking: Dickens, Matthew Sweet and guests examine his oeuvre and the way his work connects with the present day, while Landmarks: Charles Dickens is devoted to the great author's final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend.

Finally, Indian writer Ayeesha Menon finds out about her country's love affair with Charles Dickens in The Documentary: Dickens and India - Mutual Friends; and his enduring significance is explored in the five-part Radio 3 series The Writer's Dickens, in which contemporary novelists Tessa Hadley, Romesh Gunesekera, AL Kennedy, Alexander McCall Smith and Justin Cartwright consider the craft of Dickens' prose and reveal how he is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing.

Copyright © 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

About the author

Alexander McCall Smith is one of the world's most prolific and most popular authors. His career has been a varied one: for many years he was a professor of Medical Law and worked in universities in the United Kingdom and abroad. Then, after the publication of his highly successful No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, which has sold over twenty million copies, he devoted his time to the writing of fiction and has seen his various series of books translated into over forty-six languages and become bestsellers through the world. These include the Scotland Street novels, first published as a serial novel in The Scotsman, the Isabel Dalhousie novels, the Von Igelfeld series, and the Corduroy Mansions series, novels which started life as a delightful (but challenging to write) cross-media serial, written on the website of the Telegraph Media Group. This series won two major cross-media awards - Association of Online Publishers Digital Publishing Award 2009 for a Cross Media Project and the New Media Age award. In addition to these series, Alexander writes stand-alone books, including The Forever Girl; Fatty O'Leary's Dinner Party and Emma - a reworking of the classic Jane Austen novel. He is also the author of a book on Edinburgh, A Work of Beauty: Alexander McCall Smith's Edinburgh, as well as several collections of short stories, academic works, and over thirty books for children. He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the British Book Awards Author of the Year Award in 2004 and a CBE for service to literature in 2007. He holds honorary doctorates from nine universities in Europe and North America. In March of 2011 he received an award from the President of Botswana for his services through literature to that country. Alexander McCall Smith lives in Edinburgh. He is married to a doctor and has two daughters. Claire Tomalin was literary editor of the New Statesman then the Sunday Times before leaving to become a full-time writer. Her first book, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, won the Whitbread First Book Award, and she has since written a number of highly acclaimed and bestselling biographies. They include Jane Austen: A Life, The Invisible Woman, a definitive account of Dickens' relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, which won three major literary awards, and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self was Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002. In the highly acclaimed Charles Dickens: A Life, she presents a full-scale biography of our greatest novelist. She is married to the writer Michael Frayn.

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