Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, credited to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 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 Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Read in English by volunteer readers. This is Stowe's second book, another one depicting the horrors of southern slavery, published 4 years after Uncle Tom's Cabin and 5 years before the commencement of the Civil War, when new territories wanting admittance into the US (Texas, Oklahoma, name the states), were vying to become slave states, threatening to spread the heinous system. While a work of fiction, the book successfully documents the horrors of the slave system, and depicts how some slaves escaped into the Dismal Swamp (a real place spreading over a million acres in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina), where they often lived for years hiding from their pursuers, often in community. Dred, one of Stowe's most unusual heroic characters, proclaims his mission as follows: ". . .the burden of the Lord is upon me . . . to show unto this people their iniquity, and be a sign unto this evil nation!'" The book depicts that slaves were not all passive victims, as so often portrayed, and had many white sympathizers, but all were caught in the grips of a legal system so stacked against them that nobody could overturn it without threats to life and limb. The book was welcomed by the anti-slavery movement in Europe as well as in America, and helped move the needle of sympathy to finally overthrowing the system. - Summary by Michele Fry

Recording facts

• Recording title: Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
• Author credits: Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 62
• Listed recording duration: 25:36:59

Catalogue topics

• slavery
• civil war
• abolitionist
• Virginia
• camp meeting
• north carolina
• anti-slavery
• plantation life

Opening tracks: first 24 of 62

1. 00 - 00. Preface — 5:29
2. 01 - 01. The Mistress of Canema — 21:44
3. 02 - 02. Clayton — 28:35
4. 03 - 03. The Clayton Family and Sister Anne — 25:02
5. 04 - 04. The Gordon Family — 46:34
6. 05 - 05. Harry and his Wife — 39:00
7. 06 - 06. The Dilemma — 25:22
8. 07 - 07. Consultation — 10:02
9. 08 - 08. Old Tiff — 51:16
10. 09 - 09. The Death — 11:29
11. 10 - 10. The Preparation — 24:09
12. 11 - 11. The Lovers — 28:30
13. 12 - 12. Explanations — 36:59
14. 13 - 13. Tom Gordon — 40:19
15. 14 - 14. Aunt Nesbit's Loss — 22:00
16. 15 - 15. Mr. Jekyl's Opinions — 14:19
17. 16 - 16. Milly's Story — 40:30
18. 17 - 17. Uncle John — 29:19
19. 18 - 18. Dred — 19:43
20. 19 - 19. The Conspirators — 27:02
21. 20 - 20. Summer Talk at Canema — 25:57
22. 21 - 21. Tiff's Preparations — 19:11
23. 22 - 22. The Worshippers — 35:59
24. 23 - 23.1 The Camp Meeting — 35:34

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.