Beckside Lights: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Beckside Lights, credited to John Ackworth, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Beckside Lights by John Ackworth. Read in English by Phil Benson John Ackworth was the pen name of the Rev. Frederick R. Smith, a Methodist minister who was born in Snaith, Yorkshire, but spent much of his career as a circuit preacher in Lancashire. Beckside Lights is the sequel to his popular collection of stories Clog Shop Chronicles. Set in the fictional village of Beckside (said to be somewhere between Manchester and Bolton), the book consists of 12 tales of everyday life in a close-knit Methodist community, which continue with a third volume, Doxy Dent (1899). Based on an entertaining group of Methodist who gather around Jabez Clegg's clog shop fire, the stories are sentimental at times, but Ackworth has a nice sense of irony and refrains from proselytizing. Ackworth was also a student of the Lancashire dialect and the spoken passages in his books are mostly written in a phonetic version of late 19th-century Bolton speech, which I have done my best to reproduce. ( Phil Benson)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Beckside Lights
• Author credits: John Ackworth
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 23
• Listed recording duration: 8:01:06

Catalogue topics

• Methodism
• Lancashire
• village life

Track guide

1. 01 - Introduction & The Student — 29:50
2. 02 - Leah's lover 1 — 23:56
3. 03 - Leah's lover 2 — 22:16
4. 04 - Leah's lover 3 — 23:12
5. 05 - Leah's lover 4 — 30:29
6. 06 - Sally's redemption 1 — 13:55
7. 07 - Sally's redemption 2 — 16:23
8. 08 - Lige's legacy 1 — 28:26
9. 09 - Lige's legacy 2 — 21:35
10. 10 - Lige's legacy 3 — 29:01
11. 11 - The memory of the just 1 — 14:09
12. 12 - The memory of the just 2 — 15:43
13. 13 - The memory of the just 3 — 10:32
14. 14 - Isaac's angel 1 — 20:52
15. 15 - Isaac's angel 2 — 24:50
16. 16 - Isaac's fiddle 1 — 24:58
17. 17 - Isaac's fiddle 2 — 11:50
18. 18 - Isaac's fiddle 3 — 12:57
19. 19 - The harmonium 1 — 22:31
20. 20 - The harmonium 2 — 21:06
21. 21 - The harmonium 3 — 16:38
22. 22 - The haunted man 1 — 20:09
23. 23 - The haunted man 2 — 25:48

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.