On September 20, lauded U of T professor John Baird visited the Deer Park Branch of the Toronto Public Library to give a reading and lead a discussion of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. As part of the TPL’s lecture series “Celebrate Dickens,” which commemorates the bicentennial of the author’s birth, Prof. Baird addressed the social mores of Victorian England in a talk titled “Defining the Gentleman: Status and Work in Great Expectations.”

Listen here for an enlivened reading of a much-loved classic: [audio:2012.10/Baird Podcast.mp3]

John D. Baird is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto. He has published widely on the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century in addition to his work on Dickens and Thackeray of the Victorian Period. He edited The Poems of William Cowper (ed. with C.A. Ryskamp), vol. I (1980); Vols II and III (1995; 2nd ed., 1997).