Hard Times
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Narrated by:
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Simon Prebble
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By:
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Charles Dickens
About this listen
The highest priority for Thomas Gradgrind, head of the Gradgrind model day school, is his version of education - feeding the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above curiosity and sense over sentiment...only to find himself betrayed by the very standards that govern his own unhappy life.
Hard Times is Dickens' scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society and its misapplied utilitarian philosophy. And Thomas Gradgrind is one of his most richly dimensional, memorable characters. Filled with the details and wonders of small-town life, Hard Times is also a daring novel of ideas---and ultimately a celebration of love, hope, and the limitless possibilities of the imagination.
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Verbal mistakes but lovely none the less.
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loved it much more than expected!
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Last Paragraph Missing?
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Related to this topic
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The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
- By: Charles Dickens
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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loved it much more than expected!
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Performance
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Story
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Performance
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Overall
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loved it much more than expected!
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Gripping novel, excellent production
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Fallen Woman Finds Redemption
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four and a half stars
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Narrator creates the listen
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horrible technically - echoes at most of the words
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a delight
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Performance
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Rosalie Vanderpoel, the daughter of an American multimillionaire marries an impoverished English baronet and goes to live in England. She all but loses contact with her family in America. Years later her younger sister Bettina, beautiful, intelligent and extremely rich, goes to England to find what has happened to her sister. She finds Rosalie shabby and dispirited, cowed by her husband's ill-treatment. Bettina sets about to rectify matters.
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More than Lovely
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Performance
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Story
In this rich new audio production, acclaimed British American actress Rebecca Hall brings one of E. M. Forster's most admired works to life in this classic tale of human struggle. A charming young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, is wooed by both free-spirited George Emerson and wealthy Cecil Vyse while vacationing in Italy. Though attracted to George, Lucy becomes engaged to Cecil despite twice turning down his proposals. On hearing of the news, George confesses his love, leaving Lucy torn between marrying the more socially acceptable Cecil or George, the man she knows would bring her true happiness. Should Lucy choose social acceptance or true love?
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A lovely performance, and a wonderful story
- By Robert on 01-19-19
By: E. M. Forster
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Lady Audley's Secret
- By: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
- Narrated by: Olivia Poulet
- Length: 13 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of The Christmas Hirelings comes this Audible Exclusive production of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s classic sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret. English actress Olivia Poulet gives an assured and captivating narration; a cornerstone of the genre and a scandal at the time of its publication, Lady Audley’s Secret is an entertaining and shocking tale of high drama and shifting perceptions.
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Classic 19th Century “sensation novel”
- By Susan on 08-20-19
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Jane Eyre
- By: Charlotte Brontë
- Narrated by: Thandiwe Newton
- Length: 19 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Following Jane from her childhood as an orphan in Northern England through her experience as a governess at Thornfield Hall, Charlotte Brontë's Gothic classic is an early exploration of women's independence in the mid-19th century and the pervasive societal challenges women had to endure. At Thornfield, Jane meets the complex and mysterious Mr. Rochester, with whom she shares a complicated relationship that ultimately forces her to reconcile the conflicting passions of romantic love and religious piety.
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Perfect!!
- By Amazon Customer on 04-21-16
By: Charlotte Brontë
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The Best Ghost Stories Ever Told
- Best Stories Ever Told
- By: Stephen Brennan - editor
- Narrated by: J. M. Badger, Imelda Pot
- Length: 24 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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A big, brilliant, spooky collection of classic and contemporary ghost stories that will make you hesitate before turning off that light.
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A very mixed review
- By Michael Mayer on 08-05-15
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Howards End
- By: E. M. Forster
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Howards End is a beautifully subtle tale of two very different families brought together by an unusual event. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes are practical and materialistic, leading lives of "telegrams and anger". When the elder Mrs. Wilcox dies and her family discovers she has left their country home - Howards End - to one of the Schlegel sisters, a crisis between the two families is precipitated that takes years to resolve.
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Fantastic Narration in Delightful Story
- By Wren on 05-05-18
By: E. M. Forster
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Very glad I kept going!
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A very interesting book
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'Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.' So says Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, utilitarian school board superintendent. Father to Tom and Louisa, he shapes the minds of all the young children, including his own, with the exception of only one: the circus-born Sissy Jupe.
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Excellent book and excellent performance
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In the spare, no-nonsense Gradgrind household, Tom and Louisa are raised according to their father's unyielding guiding philosophy: facts - nothing but facts. But while a ban on imagination is mere policy for the Gradgrind children, lack of whimsy is a necessary survival skill in Coketown, the grimy and grim working-class burg devoted to nothing but the relentless advance of industry...
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Good Samaritan was indeed a bad economist
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When young orphan, Oliver Twist, is sold into an apprenticeship with an undertaker, he leaves behind years of miserable servitude and mistreatment at an English workhouse. Hoping to move on to better things, he decides to escape his new, equally dreary surroundings and head to London. It is there that the novel unravels as Oliver meets a host of larger-than-life characters, including The Artful Dodger, a high-ranking member of a juvenile pickpocketing gang, and their elderly leader, Fagin.
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Narration
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The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
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loved it much more than expected!
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Very glad I kept going!
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A very interesting book
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'Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.' So says Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, utilitarian school board superintendent. Father to Tom and Louisa, he shapes the minds of all the young children, including his own, with the exception of only one: the circus-born Sissy Jupe.
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Excellent book and excellent performance
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When young orphan, Oliver Twist, is sold into an apprenticeship with an undertaker, he leaves behind years of miserable servitude and mistreatment at an English workhouse. Hoping to move on to better things, he decides to escape his new, equally dreary surroundings and head to London. It is there that the novel unravels as Oliver meets a host of larger-than-life characters, including The Artful Dodger, a high-ranking member of a juvenile pickpocketing gang, and their elderly leader, Fagin.
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loved it much more than expected!
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This Audible Exclusive performance features a unique introduction written and narrated by Miriam Margolyes. Recognised as one of Dickens' most accomplished titles, Bleak House has impressed critics and audiences alike since it was first published in 1852. The novel boasts one of the most intelligent and engaging plots in all of English literature and is sure to engage the listener's imagination as it transports us back in time to the seedy, grimy and hazardous streets of Victorian London.
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The Best Audiobook Ever?
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Story
Orphaned at birth, Oliver Twist is born into the grimmest of 19th century English workhouses with a life of grinding poverty ahead of him. But the boy is a fighter and after being evicted from the workhouse for asking for 'more' and surviving a stint as an undertaker’s assistant, he walks many miles to London and finds a whole new life with a gang of young pickpockets led by the Artful Dodger and their guardian Fagin.
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Liked it, didn't love it
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Exclusively from Audible. 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' So begins Charles Dickens' most famous historical drama: a gripping tale of war, social injustice and the choice between darkness and light. After being unjustly imprisoned for 18 years, French doctor Manette is released from the Bastille jail in Paris and embarks upon a journey to London in the hope of finding the daughter he never met.
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Very Good But Not The Best On Audible--
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Story
London. A city drowning in fog. Amid that fog, a man with no name dies above a strange junkshop. Threads of mist and intrigue weave around a court case with no resolution, linking great country houses with the lowest slum in the city, mingling the high-born with a boy who sweeps the filthy streets, enshrouding devious plots and sudden murder, bringing together two extraordinary women – Lady Dedlock and Esther Summerson - who seem to have nothing whatsoever in common but who will find themselves inextricably linked.
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What can one say - it’s Dickens!
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By: Charles Dickens, and others
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The Charles Dickens Collection: 10 Novels
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This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of 10 of Charles Dickens' great novels in one audiobook. The novels included here are A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Great Expectations, The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son and A Christmas Carol.
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Excellent
- By Chad Walter on 06-13-22
By: Charles Dickens
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This lush novel, set in 1766 England and America, evokes an era ripe with riot and revolution, from the teeming streets of London to the sprawling grounds of a Virginia plantation. Mack McAsh burns with the desire to escape his life of slavery in Scottish coal mines while Lizzie Hallim is desperate to shed a life of sheltered subjugation to her spineless husband. United in America, their only chance for freedom lies beyond the Western frontier - if they're brave enough to take it.
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Expected better than a historical romance
- By Lynette Garet on 01-09-17
By: Ken Follett
What listeners say about Hard Times
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- connie
- 04-11-09
great satire on educational system
More than Dickens' usual over-the-top tale of the unjust hard times of the working poor, "Hard Times" skewers the industrial education model, on which we still function to some degree. When I did my teacher training, I wish I had been assigned this novel rather than a dozen scholarly articles that made the same points, but in the "Gradgrind" way. As usual, Dickens slips into occasional pathos with one dimensional caricatues, but with his wonderfully entertaining prose, he can get away with even that. Prebble's narration is wonderful as usual.
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6 people found this helpful
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Overall
- marian
- 05-12-11
Simon Prebble is a gift from God
I have listened to stories all my life, and thought my mother was perhaps the most gifted reader born, (to hear her Piglet and Pooh was to understand the elasticity of love). But Simon Prebble is better. I will listen to everything he has recorded; it's my new purpose. No one else could have done Sleary justice; he becomes more than my own mind had made him when I read Hard Times so long ago: from Prebble's tongue he is a monument of dignity with a slippery 's'. And Prebble's reading of Susanna Clarke's work is perhaps even more astonishing - footnotes and all. I'm blissed out!
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6 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Sharon
- 07-17-10
Classic Book, Classic Audiobook
One of Dickens' shorter novels, "Hard Times" is uncomplicated, easy to follow, and one of the author's more melancholy works. It is filled with memorable characters and is extremely moving. Simon Prebble, an always excellent narrator, adds tremendously to the pleasure of this audiobook and brings this piece of moral literature beautifully to life.
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3 people found this helpful
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- William L. Scarry
- 10-24-17
An early Dickens Classic
Another classic by Dickens. Wonderful performance, as always, by Simon Prebble. The story wobbles a wee bit here and there, as this is one of Dickens' earlier works. But, in usual Dickens fashion, there are plenty of colorful characters who play their parts perfectly, as the author unwinds his wonderful story of morality, justice and hope. I prefer Great Expectations, but this is a beautiful story as well.
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