Why are radio adaptations so much better than screen versions of Dickens? Because without the visuals you can use your imagination to bring the characters uniquely to life so that you relate to them personally. You need a proper dinner.Ĭlassic Radio Dramas: Six Plays by Charles Dickens (28hrs, Audio Go, £48) Naxos does cheaper abridged versions of all 17 books, but they're just snacks. Bullied, beaten, cheated, put upon – will our poor, trusting, irritatingly innocent hero never be free of the Steerforths, the Heeps, the waiters who snaffle his dinner, the carriers who run off with his goods? Of course he will, because there are as many decent, heartwarming Mr Dicks and Dr Strongs, especially in David Copperfield, as there are crooks.
Don't give it to him, for God's sake, you want to scream, don't trust him, he's a rogue – but of course he does and sits outside on the doorstep all day until he gets the money. "Oh my lungs and liver no! Oh my eyes and whiskers, no! Oh my legs and …" etc, roars the terrifying second-hand clothes dealer in Chatham when 10-year-old Davey (penniless, hungry and running away from a wretched life in London to look for his only living relative in Dover) tentatively suggests that 18 pence is a fair price for his jacket. It takes a little while to adjust to his unhurried pace, the leviathan sentences, the digressions, the repetitions. If you've lost the Dickens habit, be patient. Thus encouraged we moved on to Great Expectations, Hard Times et al for ourselves but that was a long time ago. Sister Agnes de Sales reading it aloud after supper in the convent as we darned our socks may not have been as affecting as Nicholas Bolton's Mr Peggotty a-searching through the whole wide world for to bring back Little Em'ly, his darling niece, but it regularly reduced us to tears. David Copperfield was my introduction to Dickens and, in a way, to audio. Without the tributes and mass coverage of his bicentenary, I might have forgotten just how great a writer he is, hence my 2012 mission to become reacquainted with Dombey, Rudge, Nickleby, Chuzzlewit, Pickwick – the whole gang.
When Dickens's last, unfinished book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, comes out in May, Naxos will have recorded all of his novels unabridged, totalling 440½ hours of incomparable entertainment by the world's greatest storyteller. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, read by Nicholas Bolton (36hrs unabridged, Naxos, £85)
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