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  The Classic Tales Podcast -...

  Various Various

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  The first award-winning season of The Classic Tales Podcast, topping the iTunes charts as the #3 overall podcast. Here B.J. Harrison reintroduces the world to the greatest short fiction ever written, from Poe, Dickens, Hardy, Stevenson, Fitzgerald and many, many others.Titles include: "The Cask of Amontillado", by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Speckled Band", by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; "Barbara of the House of Grebe", by Thomas Hardy; "Rappaccini's Daughter", by Nathaniel Hawthorne; "The Monkey's Paw", by W.W. Jacobs; "The Lost Phoebe", by Theodore Dreiser; "The Pit and the Pendulum", by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Magic Shop", by H.G. Wells; "The Red Headed League", by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; "The Baron of Grogswig", by Charles Dickens; "The Ambitious Guest", by Nathaniel Hawthorne; "The Tell-Tale Heart", by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Mortal Immortal", by Mary Shelley; "Tobin's Palm and The Ransom of Red Chief", by O. Henry; "The Eyes", by Edith Wharton; "The Happy Prince and Other Tales", by Oscar Wilde; "The Devil and Tom Walker", by Washington Irving; "Hurst of Hurstcote", by E. Nesbit; "Selections from Hamlet", by William Shakespeare; "The Captain of the Pole Star", by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; "The Vampyre", by John Polidori; "The Mark of the Beast", by Rudyard Kipling; "The Hand", by Guy de Maupassant; "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", by Washington Irving; "Young Goodman Brown", by Nathaniel Hawthorne; "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Caleveras County", by Mark Twain; "The Courtship of Miles Standish", by Henry W. Longfellow; "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", by F. Scott Fitzgerald; "The Gift of the Magi", and "The Last Leaf" by O. Henry; "A Christmas Carol", by Charles Dickens.

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  In Bayswater - One family is...

  Mary Butts

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  Mary Frances Butts was born on 13th December 1890 in Poole, Dorset. 
   
  Her early years were spent at Salterns, an 18th-century house overlooking Poole Harbour.  Sadly in 1905 her father died, and she was sent for boarding at St Leonard's school for girls in St Andrews. 
   
  Her mother remarried and, from 1909, Mary studied at Westfield College in London, and here, first became aware of her bisexual feelings.  She was sent down for organising a trip to Epsom races and only completed her degree in 1914 when she graduated from the London School of Economics.  By then Mary had become an admirer of the occultist Aleister Crowley and she was given a co-authorship credit on his ‘Magick (Book 4)’. 
   
  In 1916, she began the diary which would now detail her future life and be a constant reference point for her observations and her absorbing experiences. 
   
  During World War I, she was doing social work for the London County Council in Hackney Wick, and involved in a lesbian relationship.  Life changed after meeting the modernist poet, John Rodker and they married in 1918. 
   
  In 1921 she spent 3 months at Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Sicily; she found the practices dreadful and also acquired a drug habit.  Mary now spent time writing in Dorset, including her celebrated book of short stories ‘Speed the Plough’ which saw fully develop her unique Modernist prose style. 
   
  Europe now beckoned and several years were spent in Paris befriending many artists and writing further extraordinary stories.   
   
  She was continually sought after by literary magazines and also published several short story collections as books. Although a Modernist writer she worked in other genres but is essentially only known for her short stories.  Mary was deeply committed to nature conservation and wrote several pamphlets attacking the growing pollution of the countryside. 
   
  In 1927, she divorced and the following year her novel ‘Armed with Madness’ was published.  A further marriage followed in 1930 and time was spent attempting to settle in London and Newcastle before setting up home on the western tip of Cornwall.  By 1934 the marriage had failed. 
   
  Mary Butts died on 5th March 1937, at the West Cornwall Hospital, Penzance, after an operation for a perforated gastric ulcer. She was 46. 
   
  Her story ‘In Bayswater’ grippingly describes a man’s friendship with a dysfunctional family he rents a room from.  As each facet reveals itself his opinion and decisions change, back and forth, this way and that….

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  Gate of the Hundred Sorrows The...

  Rudyard Kipling

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  This story was first published in the Civil and Military Gazette on September 26th 1884, when Kipling was not yet nineteen, and collected in Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888, and in subsequent editions of this collection. It was his first short story to be published - a tour de force that set a standard which - with a few lapses - he maintained for the rest of his life.The tale is presented as a monologue by Gabral Misquitta, a half-caste opium addict, six weeks before his death. It describes the life of the opium den, and of the opium smokers, in the Coppersmith's Gully near the mosque of Wazir Khan. In the end, all life for them revolves around the 'black smoke'. There is nothing else.

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  Oliver Twist

  Charles Dickens

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  Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy's Progress is Charles Dickens's second novel, and was published as a serial from 1837 to 1839 and released as a three-volume book in 1838, before the serialization ended. The story centres on orphan Oliver Twist, born in a workhouse and sold into apprenticeship with an undertaker. After escaping, Oliver travels to London, where he meets the Artful Dodger, a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin.Oliver Twist is notable for its unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives, as well as for exposing the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century. The alternative title, The Parish Boy's Progress, alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, as well as the 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress and A Harlot's Progress.In this early example of the social novel, Dickens satirises the hypocrisies of his time, including child labour, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of working as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens's own experiences as a youth contributed as well.Oliver Twist has been the subject of numerous adaptations for various media, including a highly successful musical play, Oliver!, and the multiple Academy Award-winning 1968 motion picture. Disney also put its spin on the novel with the animated film called Oliver & Company in 1988.

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  The House of Cobwebs

  George Gissing

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  George Robert Gissing (1857-1903) was a popular English novelist and short story writer who also worked as a teacher and tutor throughout his life.The House of Cobwebs is the story of an emerging friendship between two unlikely housemates: a young, struggling novelist and his landlord, a middle-aged retired assistant chemist who has inherited three dilapidated houses which are most definitely not fit for human habitation.

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  Far From the Madding Crowd

  Thomas Hardy

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  Thomas Hardy's novel about a British farm girl and her effect on the men who fall in love with her is read by Julie Christie. This rebellious young woman finds her affections a cause for competition between a soldier, a wealthy landowner, and a modest sheep farmer.

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