The Classic Literature Podcast.

Send us Fan MailThis month, we turn to one of Dickens’s most beloved and enduring novels: Great Expectations. If our last episode took us through the tumults of revolution and the astonishing possibility of resurrection, this one brings us somewhere far more intimate, into the heart of a young boy named Pip, and into the long, winding path of becoming the person he was meant to be. Great Expectations is ultimately a story of transformation. Not sudden, dramatic transformation, but slow, painful, often awkward growth. The kind of growth most of us recognise. We meet characters who are wounded, proud, hopeful, and sometimes heartbreakingly human. Miss Havisham, frozen in time like a wedding cake left out overnight. Estella, beautiful and unreachable, trained to break hearts. And Joe Gargery, the kind of man who reminds us that true gentility has very little to do with money. Through it all, Dickens asks us to consider what truly shapes a life: Wealth or character, status or compassion, pride or humility, expectation or grace. This is a novel about the dangers of misplaced longing, the cost of shame, and the surprising ways love can soften even the hardest hearts. It’s about the people who influence us, for good or ill, and the moments that reveal who we really are. And it’s about the quiet, persistent work of redemption that can unfold even in the most unlikely places.Welcome to Great Expectations: A tale of becoming, belonging, and of the grace that meets us on the road.Support the showFollow and support me on Patreon.Jeremy McCandless | Creating Podcasts and Bible Study Resources | PatreonTo receive my weekly newsletter and keep up to date with all five of my podcasts, subscribe at:Jeremy McCandless | SubstackCheck out my other Podcasts.The Journey Podcast (A Verse by Verse Study through the whole Bible: https://thebiblejourneydailypodcast.buzzsprout.comHistory of the Christian Church: https://thehistoryofthechristianchurch.buzzsprout.comThe L.I.F.E. Podcast: (Philosophy and current trends in the Arts and Entertainment Podcast).https://the-living-in-faith-everyday-podcast.buzzsprout.comThe Renewed Mind Podcast. My Psychology and Mental Health Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568891The Classic Literature Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568906To visit my Author page on Amazon and view my entire back catalogue of books on both Amazon and Kindle and now also on Audible, Visit:Amazon.com: Jeremy R Mccandless: books, biography, latest update

Send us Fan MailToday, I step into one of Dickens’s most dramatic landscapes. Gone are the fog‑choked courts of Bleak House, the industrial crash of Hard Times, and the quiet prisons of Little Dorrit. Instead, we find ourselves standing at the very edge of history in two cities, London and Paris, in drawing rooms and streets, in a world trembling under the anticipated weight of revolution.A Tale of Two Cities is a novel of contrasts. Light and darkness, hope and despair, cruelty and compassion, death and resurrection. It is Dickens at his most urgent and symbolic, weaving a story where nations rise, crowds roar, and individual lives are caught in the great turning of the age.But at the centre of all this drama stands something really human: the possibility of transformation. The idea that a life can be remade. That sacrifice can redeem. That love can reach into the deepest shadows and bring someone home.In this episode, we’ll explore the world Dickens creates amid the tensions of the French Revolution, the novel's spiritual touchstone, the characters who carry its burdens, and the extraordinary act of grace that gives the story its enduring power. And, as always, we’ll reflect on what it means for us, for our own lives, our own faith, our own hopes of renewal.So, settle in, and let’s step together into the tale of two cities, a story of brokenness, courage, and the astonishing possibility of resurrection.A story of memory, revolution, sacrifice, and personal resurrection.Support the showFollow and support me on Patreon.Jeremy McCandless | Creating Podcasts and Bible Study Resources | PatreonTo receive my weekly newsletter and keep up to date with all five of my podcasts, subscribe at:Jeremy McCandless | SubstackCheck out my other Podcasts.The Journey Podcast (A Verse by Verse Study through the whole Bible: https://thebiblejourneydailypodcast.buzzsprout.comHistory of the Christian Church: https://thehistoryofthechristianchurch.buzzsprout.comThe L.I.F.E. Podcast: (Philosophy and current trends in the Arts and Entertainment Podcast).https://the-living-in-faith-everyday-podcast.buzzsprout.comThe Renewed Mind Podcast. My Psychology and Mental Health Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568891The Classic Literature Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568906To visit my Author page on Amazon and view my entire back catalogue of books on both Amazon and Kindle and now also on Audible, Visit:Amazon.com: Jeremy R Mccandless: books, biography, latest update

Send us Fan MailWelcome back to the series. As we turn the page from Hard Times to Little Dorrit, we move from one of Dickens’s most compressed, industrially charged novels into one of his most expansive and, let’s be honest, most devastating works. Yet the shift is not a departure—it’s a deepening. Hard Times exposed a world stripped down to facts, figures, and utility. It showed us what happens when imagination is starved, and compassion is mechanised, when human beings are reduced to cogs in an economic machine. Its landscapes of factories, schoolrooms, and smoke. Places where not just the person but the soul struggled to breathe. Now, in Little Dorrit, Dickens takes that same concern for the suffocation of the human spirit and places it inside a different kind of machinery: the vast, invisible, and often absurd bureaucracy of Victorian society. Both novels ask: What becomes of someone when the world around them forgets their humanity?  In Hard Times, the answer was found on the factory floor.In Little Dorrit, it is found at the prison gate. So today, as we begin this new episode, we carry forward the themes of confinement, compassion, and the search for dignity. We move from the smoke-filled streets of Coketown, to the corridors of the Marshalsea Prison. Different settings, but the same Dickensian heartbeat: a fierce insistence that every life, no matter how small or overlooked, deserves to be seen. Let’s step together into Little Dorrit, where the walls of the prison are only the beginning of the story….Support the showFollow and support me on Patreon.Jeremy McCandless | Creating Podcasts and Bible Study Resources | PatreonTo receive my weekly newsletter and keep up to date with all five of my podcasts, subscribe at:Jeremy McCandless | SubstackCheck out my other Podcasts.The Journey Podcast (A Verse by Verse Study through the whole Bible: https://thebiblejourneydailypodcast.buzzsprout.comHistory of the Christian Church: https://thehistoryofthechristianchurch.buzzsprout.comThe L.I.F.E. Podcast: (Philosophy and current trends in the Arts and Entertainment Podcast).https://the-living-in-faith-everyday-podcast.buzzsprout.comThe Renewed Mind Podcast. My Psychology and Mental Health Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568891The Classic Literature Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568906To visit my Author page on Amazon and view my entire back catalogue of books on both Amazon and Kindle and now also on Audible, Visit:Amazon.com: Jeremy R Mccandless: books, biography, latest update

Send us Fan MailThe Classic Literature Podcast.My monthly podcast that looks at famous classic books I have been reading and considers them with an eye on any original Christian cultural perspectives.Charles Dickens - Hard Times (1857) Fact Fire, and the Machinery of the Human Spirit.Welcome to Hard Times, Dickens’s shortest novel, and in many ways, his sharpest.This is Dickens at his most prophetic, warning us about a worldview that reduces people to numbers, imagination to waste, and compassion to inefficiency.We begin in a classroom.A room stripped of colour, stripped of the wonder of learning, stripped of anything that might nourish the imagination. At the front stands Thomas Gradgrind — a man who believes that facts are the only food fit for the human mind. “Facts alone,” he insists. “Nothing else will do.”And in that moment, Dickens introduces the great tension of the novel: the battle between fact and imagination, between the measurable and the mysterious, between the industrial logic of Coketown and the irreducible dignity of the human heart.What Dickens gives us in Hard Times is not just a critique of Victorian industry. It is a critique of any worldview, in any age, that treats people as tools, children as data points, and imagination as a distraction.A novel where Dickens invites us to look closely at the forces that shape us, the stories we tell ourselves, and the quiet, stubborn resilience of the human spirit. Let’s begin….Support the showFollow and support me on Patreon.Jeremy McCandless | Creating Podcasts and Bible Study Resources | PatreonTo receive my weekly newsletter and keep up to date with all five of my podcasts, subscribe at:Jeremy McCandless | SubstackCheck out my other Podcasts.The Journey Podcast (A Verse by Verse Study through the whole Bible: https://thebiblejourneydailypodcast.buzzsprout.comHistory of the Christian Church: https://thehistoryofthechristianchurch.buzzsprout.comThe L.I.F.E. Podcast: (Philosophy and current trends in the Arts and Entertainment Podcast).https://the-living-in-faith-everyday-podcast.buzzsprout.comThe Renewed Mind Podcast. My Psychology and Mental Health Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568891The Classic Literature Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568906To visit my Author page on Amazon and view my entire back catalogue of books on both Amazon and Kindle and now also on Audible, Visit:Amazon.com: Jeremy R Mccandless: books, biography, latest update

Send us Fan MailThe Classic Literature Podcast.My monthly podcast that looks at famous classic books I have been reading and analyzes them with an eye on any original Christian cultural perspectives.Charles Dickens - Bleak House (1853) Justice, and the Human Heart.Episode Notes: This month, I have been reading one of the greatest achievements of Charles Dickens’s imagination. A novel vast in scope, prophetic in tone, and startlingly modern in its concerns.  Bleak House is a world of fog and chancery courts, of secrets and systems, of human frailty and divine justice. A world where Dickens turns his sharpest moral vision toward the structures that shape society, not merely the individuals who inhabit it. In this episode, we’ll explore how Dickens brings together two narrative voices, one all-knowing and thunderous, the other gentle and deeply human, to create a narrative of truth that feels as relevant today as it did in 1853.  We’ll look at the fog that opens the novel, not just as weather, but as metaphor: the fog of confusion, the fog of injustice, the fog that settles over a society when truth is obscured, and responsibility is deferred. So, settle in, as today we enter Bleak House. A novel of mystery and mercy, of judgment and grace, of systems that fail and people who choose to love anyway. A novel that asks not only what justice is, but what it means to be responsible for one another in a world that often prefers to look away.....For a Full list of references used in the preparation of this episode, please visit my FREE Patreon  Version of this post at: https://www.patreon.com/posts/charles-dickens-158316231?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_linkSupport the showFollow and support me on Patreon.Jeremy McCandless | Creating Podcasts and Bible Study Resources | PatreonTo receive my weekly newsletter and keep up to date with all five of my podcasts, subscribe at:Jeremy McCandless | SubstackCheck out my other Podcasts.The Journey Podcast (A Verse by Verse Study through the whole Bible: https://thebiblejourneydailypodcast.buzzsprout.comHistory of the Christian Church: https://thehistoryofthechristianchurch.buzzsprout.comThe L.I.F.E. Podcast: (Philosophy and current trends in the Arts and Entertainment Podcast).https://the-living-in-faith-everyday-podcast.buzzsprout.comThe Renewed Mind Podcast. My Psychology and Mental Health Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568891The Classic Literature Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568906To visit my Author page on Amazon and view my entire back catalogue of books on both Amazon and Kindle and now also on Audible, Visit:Amazon.com: Jeremy R Mccandless: books, biography, latest update

Send us Fan MailToday, I look at what Charles Dickens himself called his “favourite child; David Copperfield. This is Dickens turning the pen towards interpreting his own life. It is a redemption story where childhood becomes the soil in which the soul can grow in grace, and where the search for identity becomes a spiritual pilgrimage.This is Dickens at his most personal and his most vulnerable, and because of that, it is also Dickens at his most universal. We read David Copperfield not simply to follow the life of one young man, but to recognise something of our own story, maybe our own wounds, our longings, our mistakes, our hopes, all woven into his.Support the showFollow and support me on Patreon.Jeremy McCandless | Creating Podcasts and Bible Study Resources | PatreonTo receive my weekly newsletter and keep up to date with all five of my podcasts, subscribe at:Jeremy McCandless | SubstackCheck out my other Podcasts.The Journey Podcast (A Verse by Verse Study through the whole Bible: https://thebiblejourneydailypodcast.buzzsprout.comHistory of the Christian Church: https://thehistoryofthechristianchurch.buzzsprout.comThe L.I.F.E. Podcast: (Philosophy and current trends in the Arts and Entertainment Podcast).https://the-living-in-faith-everyday-podcast.buzzsprout.comThe Renewed Mind Podcast. My Psychology and Mental Health Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568891The Classic Literature Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568906To visit my Author page on Amazon and view my entire back catalogue of books on both Amazon and Kindle and now also on Audible, Visit:Amazon.com: Jeremy R Mccandless: books, biography, latest update

Send us Fan Mail(Please note this episode was originally recorded and release on Christmas Eve 2025 a free 'subscribes  only' bonus episode for people following me on Patreon). Episode Notes:Few stories have entered the cultural bloodstream like A Christmas Carol. First published in December 1843, it was an instant success—selling out its first edition within days and never going out of print since.At its heart, A Christmas Carol is a gospel narrative. Ebenezer Scrooge begins as a man enslaved by greed, isolated by pride, and blind to the grace of others. He is like the rich fool of Luke 12, hoarding wealth while at the same time starving his own soul. But through the visitation of three spirits, representing past memories, Judgment, and Mercy, he is transformed.Culturally, Dickens, through this story, reshaped our idea of Christmas itself. Before A Christmas Carol, the holiday was fading in England—seen by many as old-fashioned, even unnecessary. Dickens revived it with this book.This episode is not just a beloved tale—it’s a spiritual truth. Revealing that no heart is too hard for grace to reach. That no soul is too lost for redemption. And that Christmas, at its core, is not about sentiment—it is about salvation. Support the showFollow and support me on Patreon.Jeremy McCandless | Creating Podcasts and Bible Study Resources | PatreonTo receive my weekly newsletter and keep up to date with all five of my podcasts, subscribe at:Jeremy McCandless | SubstackCheck out my other Podcasts.The Journey Podcast (A Verse by Verse Study through the whole Bible: https://thebiblejourneydailypodcast.buzzsprout.comHistory of the Christian Church: https://thehistoryofthechristianchurch.buzzsprout.comThe L.I.F.E. Podcast: (Philosophy and current trends in the Arts and Entertainment Podcast).https://the-living-in-faith-everyday-podcast.buzzsprout.comThe Renewed Mind Podcast. My Psychology and Mental Health Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568891The Classic Literature Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568906To visit my Author page on Amazon and view my entire back catalogue of books on both Amazon and Kindle and now also on Audible, Visit:Amazon.com: Jeremy R Mccandless: books, biography, latest update

Send us Fan MailCharles Dickens - The Old Curiosity Shop. (Please note this episode was the first of My Charles Dickens episodes originally recorded in 2025 as a free 'subscribes  only' bonus episode for people following the Bible Project Daily Podcast on Patreon). Episode Notes:Hello and welcome to today’s episode, where I drop into the world of Martin Chuzzlewit—the Dickens novel that even some Dickens fans sometimes only pretend they’ve read. If Oliver Twist would become a popular kids' movie, and A Christmas Carol everybody’s favourite sentimental movie. Martin Chuzzlewit is more like that eccentric foreign film that shows up on late-night TV and insists on the character discussing opaque philosophy in its subtitles.But don’t be fooled by its reputation. This novel is a spiritual goldmine wrapped in satire, stuffed with schemers, and sprinkled with just enough organ music and malaria to keep things interesting. We’ve got hypocrites, murderers, and one man who believes true happiness only counts if you earn it in a swamp. So, let’s step into the Chuzzleverse, where selfishness reigns, grace surprises, and even the most stubborn hearts can be softened….Support the showFollow and support me on Patreon.Jeremy McCandless | Creating Podcasts and Bible Study Resources | PatreonTo receive my weekly newsletter and keep up to date with all five of my podcasts, subscribe at:Jeremy McCandless | SubstackCheck out my other Podcasts.The Journey Podcast (A Verse by Verse Study through the whole Bible: https://thebiblejourneydailypodcast.buzzsprout.comHistory of the Christian Church: https://thehistoryofthechristianchurch.buzzsprout.comThe L.I.F.E. Podcast: (Philosophy and current trends in the Arts and Entertainment Podcast).https://the-living-in-faith-everyday-podcast.buzzsprout.comThe Renewed Mind Podcast. My Psychology and Mental Health Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568891The Classic Literature Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568906To visit my Author page on Amazon and view my entire back catalogue of books on both Amazon and Kindle and now also on Audible, Visit:Amazon.com: Jeremy R Mccandless: books, biography, latest update

Send us Fan MailWhen Charles Dickens published Dombey and Son in 1846, he stepped into a deeper, darker, and more mature phase of his writing. If A Christmas Carol is the gospel wrapped in snow and candlelight, Dombey and Son is the truth spoken through grief, pride, and the slow unravelling of a man who believes he is untouchable.Spiritually, Dombey and Son is a story of idolatry and it undoing. It echoes the wisdom literature of the Bible, books like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and even Job. Dombey is the man who gains the world yet loses his soul. He is the rich man who cannot see Lazarus at his gate. He is the father who longs for a son to carry his name yet cannot see the daughter who already carries his heart.And yet—this is also a story of grace. Not the sudden, jubilant grace of Scrooge’s Christmas morning, but the slow, painful grace that comes through suffering. Through loss. Through the breaking of illusions. In this book, Dickens shows us that sometimes God heals not by adding, but by taking away. Not by lifting us up, but by bringing us low enough to see clearly.So, as we open Dombey and Son, we step into a story where the gospel is not shouted but spoken quietly. A story where pride is dismantled, and ahuman heart is slowly, painfully, beautifully remade….Support the showFollow and support me on Patreon.Jeremy McCandless | Creating Podcasts and Bible Study Resources | PatreonTo receive my weekly newsletter and keep up to date with all five of my podcasts, subscribe at:Jeremy McCandless | SubstackCheck out my other Podcasts.The Journey Podcast (A Verse by Verse Study through the whole Bible: https://thebiblejourneydailypodcast.buzzsprout.comHistory of the Christian Church: https://thehistoryofthechristianchurch.buzzsprout.comThe L.I.F.E. Podcast: (Philosophy and current trends in the Arts and Entertainment Podcast).https://the-living-in-faith-everyday-podcast.buzzsprout.comThe Renewed Mind Podcast. My Psychology and Mental Health Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568891The Classic Literature Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568906To visit my Author page on Amazon and view my entire back catalogue of books on both Amazon and Kindle and now also on Audible, Visit:Amazon.com: Jeremy R Mccandless: books, biography, latest update

Send us Fan MailCharles Dickens - Barnaby Rudge. (Please note this episode was originally recorded in December 2025 as a free 'subscribes  only' bonus episode for people following the Bible Project Daily Podcast on Patreon). To obtain the Copyright free recording of this book that I used in this recording by Actress Mil Nicholson  visit: Barnaby Rudge (version 2) | Episode Notes:Barnaby Rudge, Dickens’s first historical novel, begins in the quiet village of Chigwell—but it doesn’t stay there, or for that matter quiet, for long. The year is 1775, and England is simmering. Beneath the surface of tavern talk and family feuds lies a deeper unrest—religious tension, political manipulation, and the slow build-up of mob violence.By the time the novel reaches its midpoint, the Gordon Riots of 1780 have erupted. These were real events—an anti-Catholic uprising that turned London into a temporary war zone. Churches were burned. Prisons were stormed. The streets ran with fear. And Dickens, writing in 1841, uses this historical moment to ask an important and some would say timeless question: What happens when religion is weaponized?From a theological perspective, Barnaby Rudge is a meditation on fanaticism. It shows how religious language can be twisted into slogans. How spiritual conviction can be hijacked by political rage. And how the mob—once stirred—becomes a beast with no conscience that is impossible to control.In many ways, Barnaby Rudge is Dickens’s warning to the church. That when faith loses love, it becomes dangerous and that when theology loses humility, it becomes violent. And that when religion loses Christ, it moves from being a movement to becoming a riot.This novel also reflects the spiritual climate of Dickens’s own time. In 1841, England was wrestling with reform, class tension, and religious division. The Chartist movement was rising. The poor were restless. And Dickens, ever the prophet, saw the parallels.So, he wrote a story not just of history, but of humanity. Of how fear breeds fury. Of how prejudice breeds persecution. And of how the gospel must stand against the mob—not with swords, but with sacrifice.Support the showFollow and support me on Patreon.Jeremy McCandless | Creating Podcasts and Bible Study Resources | PatreonTo receive my weekly newsletter and keep up to date with all five of my podcasts, subscribe at:Jeremy McCandless | SubstackCheck out my other Podcasts.The Journey Podcast (A Verse by Verse Study through the whole Bible: https://thebiblejourneydailypodcast.buzzsprout.comHistory of the Christian Church: https://thehistoryofthechristianchurch.buzzsprout.comThe L.I.F.E. Podcast: (Philosophy and current trends in the Arts and Entertainment Podcast).https://the-living-in-faith-everyday-podcast.buzzsprout.comThe Renewed Mind Podcast. My Psychology and Mental Health Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568891The Classic Literature Podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568906To visit my Author page on Amazon and view my entire back catalogue of books on both Amazon and Kindle and now also on Audible, Visit:Amazon.com: Jeremy R Mccandless: books, biography, latest update