Do you know who would have under­stood our cur­rent polit­i­cal moment? Who would have known how to make sense of the naked avarice, wide­spread bul­ly­ing, dem­a­goguery, and preda­to­ry pol­i­tick­ing? Charles Dick­ens, that’s who.

The vil­lainy in Oliv­er Twist alone suf­fices to show just how well Dick­ens under­stood misog­y­ny, crim­i­nal exploita­tion, and the ways seduc­tive insin­cer­i­ty works to ensnare the vul­ner­a­ble.

As we approach the inter­minable hol­i­day sea­son, many of us will reflect on Dick­ens’ scathing indict­ment of greed in A Christ­mas Car­ol. Near­ly every­one wants a piece of Dick­ens’ pre­sumed polit­i­cal views. The Social­ist Review pro­claims “he would have been only too famil­iar with the shame­less pil­ing up of wealth, the poor strug­gling to sur­vive, the pen­ny pinch­ing of wel­fare, and the lofty con­tempt of our rulers” in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

But Dick­ens was no rev­o­lu­tion­ary. His for­eign pol­i­cy ideas “antic­i­pate Kipling’s pro­le­tar­i­an defend­ers of empire,” and he might have fit right in with the most star­ry-eyed of neo­con­ser­v­a­tives.

Was he a defend­er of free mar­ket ideals, as some allege? The idea seems implau­si­ble. Char­ac­ters like pre-redemp­tion Scrooge and Ralph Nickleby—who in, say, Ayn Rand’s hands might be cham­pi­ons of indi­vid­u­al­ism and self­ish­ness as a virtue—become in Dick­ens’ nov­els exam­ples of fright­en­ing­ly trun­cat­ed human­i­ty. Take this descrip­tion of Nick­le­by, uncle of the orphaned Nicholas:

He wore a sprin­kling of pow­der upon his head, as if to make him­self look benev­o­lent; but if that were his pur­pose, he would per­haps have done bet­ter to pow­der his coun­te­nance also, for there was some­thing in its very wrin­kles, and in his cold rest­less eye, which seemed to tell of cun­ning that would announce itself in spite of him.

This is the look of the deceit­ful, schem­ing busi­ness­man in Dick­ens: the cold eyes, the bare­ly-con­cealed mal­ice. In nov­els like Oliv­er Twist and Hard Times, Dick­ens “pro­vides a damn­ing cri­tique of indus­tri­al Eng­land of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry” and “an indict­ment of glob­al lais­sez faire cap­i­tal­ism of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry.” So argues The Cop­per­field Review, in any case.

But when we read Dick­ens, we don’t do so fore­most to have our polit­i­cal views bol­stered or chal­lenged, but to expe­ri­ence the immense­ly mov­ing and enter­tain­ing plots, with their vivid­ly delin­eat­ed char­ac­ters like Ralph Nick­le­by above. These qual­i­ties have always made Dick­ens’ work trans­late beau­ti­ful­ly to the stage and screen, and also to the radio waves, where Dick­ens appeared in dra­mat­ic adap­ta­tions dur­ing the medium’s gold­en age and beyond, often in star-stud­ded pro­duc­tions.

For exam­ple, at the top of the post, you can hear a 1950 radio play of David Cop­per­field with Richard Bur­ton in the title role and Boris Karloff as “the smarmi­est creep in Dick­ens,” Uri­ah Heep. The lat­ter char­ac­ter may be one of the most obses­sive­ly described in all of the author’s works, to the point of car­i­ca­ture. And yet, writes Sam Jordi­son at The Guardian, “just as Satan gets the best lines in Par­adise Lost, Heep gets some of the best moments in David Cop­per­field.”

Fur­ther up, you can hear Orson Welles star in a 1938 pro­duc­tion of A Tale of Two Cities. This play is the third in Welles and John Houseman’s series The Mer­cury The­atre on the Air, which fea­tured Welles’ hand­picked com­pa­ny of actors. Soon spon­sored by Campbell’s Soup, the pro­gram was renamed The Camp­bell Play­house by the time Welles pro­duced an adap­ta­tion of A Christ­mas Car­ol with Lionel Bar­ry­more as Scrooge.

In the Spo­ti­fy playlist above, hear that pro­duc­tion as well as a sec­ond Welles-star­ring ver­sion of A Tale of Two Cities record­ed in 1945 for the leg­endary Lux Radio The­ater. You’ll also find Richard Burton’s David Cop­per­field and clas­sic pro­duc­tions of Great Expec­ta­tions, Oliv­er Twist, The Pick­wick Papers, The Mys­tery of Edwin Drood, and short sto­ries like “The Queer Client,” “The Sig­nal­man,” and “The Tri­al for Mur­der.” If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.

Vis­it­ing, or revis­it­ing, the Dick­en­sian world through radio plays fits in per­fect­ly with the author’s own mode of dis­sem­i­nat­ing his fic­tion: he was a show­man who loved to give read­ings of  his work “with full histri­on­ic bril­liance,” writes Simon Cal­low, “and stage-man­aged to a point of high the­atri­cal­i­ty.” And through such enter­tain­ment, he believed, he might move read­ers and audi­ences with his cri­tiques of the exploita­tive sys­tems of his day.

The playlist above will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free. Copies of Dick­ens’ works can be found in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Lit­er­ary Works of Charles Dick­ens

Hear Charles Dick­ens’ A Christ­mas Car­ol Read by His Great-Grand­daugh­ter in His Pre­ferred Style

Charles Dick­ens’ Hand-Edit­ed Copy of His Clas­sic Hol­i­day Tale, A Christ­mas Car­ol

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When I first read all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries, hav­ing found them col­lect­ed in full (not, of course, includ­ing last year’s “lost” sto­ry) in two old vol­umes at an antique store, I under­stood imme­di­ate­ly why they’d so quick­ly become so pop­u­lar with their first read­er­ship in the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­turies. Or rather, I should say that I felt it–that per­fect align­ment of form and sub­stance that only comes along in pop­u­lar art every few decades.

Whether that hap­pened as a result of Doyle’s crafts­man­ship or his luck I don’t know, but it turns out that the adven­tures of his con­sult­ing detec­tive play as well on the speak­ers as they do on the page, though in quite a dif­fer­ent way. You can expe­ri­ence that dif­fer­ence for your­self, and expe­ri­ence it exten­sive­ly, with Spo­ti­fy’s 64-hour, 163-track playlist of Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries per­formed aloud. (If you don’t have Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.)

The very first voice it presents is Doyle’s own, speak­ing briefly on Holmes and spir­i­tu­al­ism, which gives us time to set­tle in for a five-part ren­di­tion of the very first in the Holmes canon (and thanks to “more female inter­est than is usu­al,” one of Doyle’s per­son­al favorites), “A Scan­dal in Bohemia.” It comes per­formed by Sir John Giel­gud and Sir Ralph Richard­son, two of the most respect­ed actors in 20th-cen­tu­ry British the­ater. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured their por­tray­als, Giel­gud’s of Holmes and Richard­son’s of Wat­son (and we can hard­ly neglect to men­tion the one and only Orson Welles’, of Mori­ar­ty), on the New Adven­tures of Sher­lock Holmes radio dra­ma.

But this playlist pro­vides a wealth of oth­er voic­es from var­i­ous eras inter­pret­ing Doyle’s most beloved works as well, a vari­ety that cer­tain­ly suits its pro­tag­o­nist, the most-por­trayed lit­er­ary char­ac­ter of all time — which means that, unlike the col­lect­ed print canon of Sher­lock Holmes adven­tures (that “lost” sto­ry and its mys­te­ri­ous author­ship aside), the col­lect­ed audio adven­tures of Sher­lock Holmes will only grow longer and longer, so those who want to lis­ten to them all had best get on the case with­out delay.

You can find this playlist added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Also find Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries in our oth­er col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Vin­tage Sher­lock Holmes Radio Dra­ma, Star­ring John Giel­gud, Orson Welles & Ralph Richard­son

Watch the First Sher­lock Holmes Movie (1900), the Arrival of the Most Pop­u­lar Char­ac­ter in Cin­e­ma

Read the Lost Sher­lock Holmes Sto­ry That Was Just Dis­cov­ered in an Attic in Scot­land

Down­load the Com­plete Sher­lock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Mas­ter­piece

Arthur Conan Doyle Names His 19 Favorite Sher­lock Holmes Sto­ries

Arthur Conan Doyle Dis­cuss­es Sher­lock Holmes and Psy­chics in a Rare Filmed Inter­view (1927)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Take two of the most promi­nent Eng­lish cul­tur­al prop­er­ties of the past sev­er­al decades, bring them togeth­er, and what have you got? You’ve got Patrick Troughton, bet­ter known as the Sec­ond Doc­tor in TV’s Doc­tor Who, in a 1965 BBC Radio adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984. Troughton was not yet the Doc­tor; the hon­or would not fall to him until the fol­low­ing year when he replaced William Hart­nell (with the latter’s full approval, it seems). But he was a well-known char­ac­ter actor, the first to play Robin Hood on tele­vi­sion (in a 1953 BBC mini-series), and a fig­ure who inspired a good deal of respect in the British enter­tain­ment indus­try. Troughton was also a dec­o­rat­ed World War II vet­er­an (who, when the year 1984 final­ly arrived, suf­fered his sec­ond major heart attack).

Troughton brings to the role of every­man Win­ston Smith a grav­i­tas shared by a num­ber of actors who have inher­it­ed the role since the very first radio adap­ta­tion in 1949, star­ring David Niv­en. Of course Orwell’s sto­ry is not an ongo­ing series like Doc­tor Who, but it has remained remark­ably rel­e­vant to every gen­er­a­tion post-World War II, and like the Doctor’s char­ac­ter, has been con­stant­ly re-imag­ined in adap­ta­tions on radio, film, and tele­vi­sion. The con­di­tions of gov­ern­ment repres­sion, cen­sor­ship, and mass sur­veil­lance Orwell fore­saw have seemed immi­nent, if not ful­ly real­ized, in the decades fol­low­ing the nov­el’s 1948 pub­li­ca­tion, though the adjec­tive “Orwellian” and many of the novel’s coinages have suf­fered a good deal through overuse and mis­ap­pli­ca­tion.

Just as the first radio play of 1984 warned of a “dis­turb­ing broad­cast,” this 1965 ver­sion begins, “The fol­low­ing play is not suit­able for those of a ner­vous dis­po­si­tion.” It’s inter­est­ing that even this long after the novel’s pub­li­ca­tion, and in the midst of the swing­ing six­ties, Orwell’s dystopi­an fable still had the pow­er to shock. Or at least the pro­duc­ers of this broad­cast thought so. Per­haps we’ve been so thor­ough­ly inured to the prospects Orwell warned of that rev­e­la­tions of the NSA’s mas­sive data col­lec­tion, or of the glob­al expro­pri­a­tion dis­closed by the Pana­ma Papers, or of any num­ber of nefar­i­ous gov­ern­ment deal­ings often elic­it a cyn­i­cal shrug from the aver­age per­son. Those who do express alarm at such doc­u­ment­ed abus­es are often brand­ed… well, alarmists.

But then again, we keep return­ing to Orwell.

Con­tin­u­ing in the tra­di­tion begun by David Niv­en and car­ried for­ward by Patrick Troughton (and on film by Edmond O’Brien and John Hurt), anoth­er respect­ed British actor recent­ly took on the role of Win­ston Smith in a BBC 4 radio adap­ta­tion three years ago. This time the actor was Christo­pher Eccle­ston, who also, it turns out, once played Doc­tor Who.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Very First Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Star­ring David Niv­en (1949)

What “Orwellian” Real­ly Means: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son About the Use & Abuse of the Term

The Cov­er of George Orwell’s 1984 Becomes Less Cen­sored with Wear and Tear

Mon­ty Python’s John Cleese Wor­ries That Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness Will Lead Us into a Humor­less World, Rem­i­nis­cent of Orwell’s 1984

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The most beloved fables have sur­vived for ages, passed down from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion in one form or anoth­er since time immemo­r­i­al. It speaks to the genius of Oscar Wilde that his chil­dren’s sto­ry “The Hap­py Prince” has attained that sta­tus despite hav­ing exist­ed for less than 130 years. In that time it has cap­ti­vat­ed read­ers, lis­ten­ers, and view­ers (includ­ing the likes of Pat­ti Smith) in the orig­i­nal text as well as in a vari­ety of adap­ta­tions, includ­ing an orches­tral per­for­mance, an ani­mat­ed film, a read­ing by Stephen Fry, and a rock opera. It also pro­vid­ed mate­r­i­al for a num­ber of radio broad­casts in the 1930s and 40s, includ­ing the one above, a read­ing by Orson Welles, Bing Cros­by, and Lurene Tut­tle.

Welles takes the Wildean role of the nar­ra­tor. Cros­by plays the tit­u­lar prince immor­tal­ized in stat­ue form with­out hav­ing ever, iron­i­cal­ly, expe­ri­enced hap­pi­ness in life. Tut­tle, a pro­lif­ic actress of not just radio but vaude­ville, film, and tele­vi­sion, gives voice to the swal­low who, left behind when his flock migrates to Egypt for the win­ter, alights on the prince’s shoul­der. In their shared lone­some­ness, the bird and the stat­ue become friends, and the prince asks the spar­row to dis­trib­ute his dec­o­ra­tions to the peo­ple of the impov­er­ished town around them. What comes of these self­less deeds? The answer resides, with the rest of the sto­ry, in the hal­lowed realm of myth.

Welles, Cros­by, and Tut­tle’s per­for­mance of “The Hap­py Prince” debuted on the Philco Radio Hall of Fame on Christ­mas Eve 1944. It proved pop­u­lar enough that two years lat­er, Dec­ca com­mis­sioned the actors for anoth­er per­for­mance of the sto­ry and put it out as a record album. In becom­ing some­thing of a hol­i­day tra­di­tion, Wilde’s immac­u­late­ly craft­ed tale of com­pan­ion­ship, sac­ri­fice, and redemp­tion has sure­ly turned a few gen­er­a­tions on to the work of one of the sharpest wits in west­ern his­to­ry. The prince and the swal­low may come to an unfor­tu­nate end on Earth, but they enjoy the recog­ni­tion their deeds have earned them in the king­dom of heav­en. Wilde’s own short life closed with a series of dif­fi­cult chap­ters, but now we all rec­og­nize the pre­cious­ness of what he left behind.

Find more read­ings of Oscar Wilde clas­sics in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry Reads Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Sto­ry “The Hap­py Prince”

Watch Ani­ma­tions of Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Sto­ries “The Hap­py Prince” and “The Self­ish Giant”

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.