In H.G. Wells’s celebrated ghost story, an intrepid and self-confident young man resolves to spend the night in a room which is reportedly haunted by a malevolent spirit, determined to disprove the legend. The story begins at 00:01:20 **Note for returning listeners: This is a new recording of a story previously available on the channel. The previous upload was actually the very first story I recorded before I set up my studio, so the audio quality was low. I hope you enjoy this new recording, released for Halloween season 2023.
Narrated/performed by Simon Stanhope, aka Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, there are a few ways you can support me (and get access to exclusive content):
* Occasional/one-off support via Buy Me a Coffee: www.buymeacoffee.com/bitesize...
* Monthly support on Patreon: / bitesizedaudio
* Visit my Bandcamp page to hear more of my performances of classic stories, and you can purchase and download high quality audio files to listen offline: bitesizedaudio.bandcamp.com/
* Become a Bitesized Audio Classics member on KZfaq, from $1 / £1 / €1 per month:
/ bitesizedaudioclassics
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:20 The Red Room
00:30:07 Credits and thanks
H.G. (Herbert George) Wells (1866-1946) was an English writer prolific in many genres. He was born in Bromley, Kent, the fourth and youngest child of former domestic servants turned shopkeepers. When the shop struggled financially, Wells was apprenticed as a draper - an unhappy experience, which he later used in novels such as 'The History of Mr. Polly' and 'Kipps'. He was released from apprenticeship to become a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School, which allowed him to self-educate and work his way via a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London. He began writing by contributing short articles to periodicals such as The Pall Mall Gazette.
As an author, Wells is perhaps best remembered today for his science fiction - he is regarded as one of the founders of the genre, and many of his works have achieved the status of classics, including The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). From a young age Wells was an active socialist, and his later writing moved away from science fiction and tackled wider social and political themes, in novels such as 'Tono-Bungay' (1909) and 'The History of Mr. Polly' (1910). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times.
'The Red Room' first appeared in the March 1896 issue of 'The Idler'. It's especially notable that Wells himself - like the narrator - was an avowed sceptic of the idea of ghosts and hauntings; it's possible the story may have been intended to some extent as a send-up or attack on the genre; but it's a powerfully and concisely written tale and, whether satire or not, 'The Red Room' has gone on to become one of the most anthologised Victorian ghost stories.
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2023