David Copperfield (unabridged)
$ 75.00
Recognised as one of the greatest works of English fiction, David Copperfield tells the story of a young man, from his painful childhood, through chance, tragedy and adventure, to self-knowledge and happiness. It includes some of Dickens’s most vividly memorable characters. The cruelly saturnine Mr Murdstone; the redoubtable Betsey Trotwood; the charismatic Steerforth; the ever-so-‘umble Uriah Heep; the magnificently spendthrift Mr Wilkins Micawber; the spiteful Miss Dartle; the faithful Traddles; and scores more – all are part of a story that is by turns enchanting, enthralling, comic and moving.
Audiobook Details:
Author: Charles DickensRead by: Nicholas Boulton
Audiobook Type: unabridged
Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
Running time (hh:mm:ss): 36:10:55
Download size: 603 MB
ISBN: 9781843795704
About the Reader
| Nicholas Boulton Nicholas Boulton trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he won the Carleton Hobbs Award. His theatre credits include An Ideal Husband, After the Rain and Arcadia for Trevor Nunn. He has appeared on TV in Two Golden Balls, Under the Moon, and Kavanagh QC, and was a member of the BBC Radio Repertory Company. |
Reviews for this Audiobook:
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 440? hours of incomparable entertainment by the world's greatest storyteller. 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. David Copperfield was my introduction to Dickens and, in a way, to audio. 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. Thus encouraged we moved on to Great Expectations, Hard Times et al. for ourselves, but that was a long time ago. If you've lost the Dickens habit, be patient. It takes a little while to adjust to his unhurried pace, the leviathan sentences, the digressions, the repetitions. '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. 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. Well, some of it. 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. Naxos does cheaper abridged versions of all 17 books, but they're just snacks. You need a proper dinner.
Sue Arnold, the Guardian
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
Probably any well-trained actor can make a good thing of Uriah Heep. Still, Nicholas Boulton's Heep is miraculously visual. You'll remember that in addition to being poisonously "'umble," Heep writhes a good deal. Boulton somehow makes his voice sinuously whiney, such that you actually see Heep coiling one horrible leg around the other while he smarms somebody. Still, it was Boulton's Betsy Trotwood that completely undid me. At her first cry of strangled outrage,"Janet! Donkeys!" I laughed out loud in the garden and startled the dog. If you haven't read Copperfield since school, you'll be surprised. The sentimentality seems worse than ever, but Dickens's eccentrics are even more shrewdly conceived than you remember. Pair that with this glorious performance, and you've got audio heaven.
AudioFile Magazine
Probably any well-trained actor can make a good thing of Uriah Heep. Still, Nicholas Boulton's Heep is miraculously visual. You'll remember that in addition to being poisonously 'umble', Heep writhes a good deal. Boulton somehow makes his voice sinuously whiney, such that you actually see Heep coiling one horrible leg around the other while he smarms somebody. Still, it was Boulton's Betsy Trotwood who completely undid me. At her first cry of strangled outrage, 'Janet! Donkeys!' I laughed out loud in the garden and startled the dog. If you haven't read Copperfield since school, you'll be surprised. The sentimentality seems worse than ever, but Dickens's eccentrics are even more shrewdly conceived than you remember. Pair that with this glorious performance, and you've got audio heaven.
B.G., AudioFile
