what is the best biography of charles dickens

11 of the best Charles Dickens books (for every type of reader)

11 of the best Charles Dickens books (for every type of reader)

One of england’s best-loved authors, charles dickens was a prolific writer. if you’re unsure where to start with his many novels, travel books and short stories, here’s our guide to the best charles dickens’ books for every type of reader. .

what is the best biography of charles dickens

Charles Dickens' books are an important part of Britain's literary heritage, and Dickens is one of the most beloved English writers of all time. Remembered as one of the great chroniclers of Victorian life, his brilliant wit and rich narratives brought him incomparable fame in the literary world, both in his own time and in ours.

From the well-known A Tale of Two Cities to the story of Oliver Twist , Charles Dickens’ era-defining novels explore social concerns like labour conditions, poverty and childhood cruelty while keeping love, friendship and sorrow at their hearts. If you're not sure where to start, we're here to help with this guide to the best Charles Dickens book for every type of reader.

The best Charles Dickens novel for crime fiction fans

Bleak house, by charles dickens.

Part tightly plotted murder mystery, part biting condemnation of the corruption at the heart of English society, Bleak House follows the inheritance case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The case has been drawn out for generations, and we’re introduced to myriad characters from all walks of life. There’s Esther Summerson, Dickens' feisty heroine; Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, cocooned in their stately home in Lincolnshire; and Jo, the penniless crossing sweeper. With murder, secrets and spies, if your go-to genre is crime fiction , then this Charles Dickens book is the one for you.

‘ Bleak House is his greatest novel . . . with its backdrop of a legal system more invested in obstruction and obfuscation than resolution, it remains utterly contemporary ’ Anna Quindlen, Independent

The best Charles Dickens book for younger readers

Oliver twist.

When orphaned Oliver Twist runs away from the workhouse he was born in and arrives by foot in London, he’s faced with a world of crime, unusual friends and unexpected kindness. Centred around the lives of Victorian children, Oliver Twist is part pleasure, part education and the perfect book to get children into Dickens.

Charles Dickens' most romantic book

Great expectations.

Also opening with a poor orphaned boy, Great Expectations tells the tale of how young Pip falls in love with a beautiful upper-class girl named Estella. Will class division get in the way of his heart? If you’re a romantic, this heartwarming, plot-twisting and captivating novel is the perfect Dickens novel to start with.

Charles Dickens' books that explore politics

Set in Coketown, an imaginary town inspired by Preston, Hard Times is a novel of social and moral themes which George Bernard Shaw called a ‘passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world.’ A savage satire of the social and economic conditions of the time, it addresses the trade union movement and post-Industrial Revolution inequality.

A Tale of Two Cities

Set against the backdrop of the French revolution, A Tale of Two Cities is the best place to start for a tense political novel. Dr Manette is finally reunited with his daughter Lucie after eighteen years of wrongful imprisonment in the Bastille. But when Lucie falls in love with Charles Darney, who’s accused of treason against the English crown, their family equilibrium is once again thrust into danger in this tightly plotted story of revenge and sacrifice.

The funniest Charles Dickens novel

The pickwick papers.

Mr. Pickwick, Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass and Nathaniel Winckle are an unlikely band of travellers drawn together in the Pickwick Club of London. They journey around England befriending everyone from country squires to local literary giants in this hilarious and sentimental novel. The Pickwick Papers is the perfect, witty novel to get you into Dickens.

The scariest Charles Dickens novel

Ghost stories.

Dickens began the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas, but his frightening and fascinating tales aren’t confined to the festive season. From gruesome legal drama ‘A Trial for Murder’, to eerie domestic farce ‘The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber’, you are guaranteed a fright in Dicken’s Ghost Stories .

The best Charles Dickens book if you like to read autobiographies

David copperfield.

Although David Copperfield is a novel, it was partly based on Charles Dickens’s own life and he described it as the favourite of his novels. The book tells the life story of David Copperfield, from his birth in Suffolk, through the various struggles of his childhood, to his successful career as a novelist. The novel’s outlandish cast of characters, which includes the glamorous Steerforth, the cheerful, verbose Mr Micawber, the villainous Uriah Heep, and David's eccentric aunt, Betsey Trotwood, make it a joy to read.

A Charles Dickens novel that will transport you back in time

Scenes of london life.

Scenes of London Life offers a genuine window into Victorian London through satirical short stories that take you from the colourful chaos of gin-shops to the destitution of pawnshops. If you want to be transported to another place, Scenes of London Life is an accessible way in.

The best Charles Dickens book to read at Christmas

A christmas carol.

An obvious choice perhaps, but Charles Dickens' beloved novella is a festive staple and the perfect Christmas read. A celebration of Christmas, a tale of redemption, and a critique of Victorian society, it follows the miserly, penny-pinching Ebenezer Scrooge who views Christmas as 'humbug'. It is only through a series of eerie, life-changing visits from the ghost of his deceased business partner Marley and the spirits of Christmas past, present and future that Scrooge begins to see the error of his ways.

If you only read one Charles Dickens book

Our mutual friend.

Often described as one of Dickens’ most sophisticated works, Our Mutual Friend was named one of the BBC’s Novels That Shaped Our World . The novel was the last that Dickens completed, and is a savage indictment of the corrupting power of money. When John Harmon dies and his estranged son is also presumed dead, his riches pass to his servants Mr and Mrs Boffin. They hire a young man to be Mr Boffin’s secretary, but what is this secretive man’s true identity?

‘ I find it irresistible: the autumn evening closing in, the crazy little boat afloat on the filthy Thames, the strong young woman plying the oars and a ragged, grizzled man, her father, busying himself with something towed in the water behind them. You are some way into the narrative before it dawns on you that it is a drowned body. ’ Shirley Hughes, Independent

In this episode of Book Break Emma explores the English seaside, including Broadstairs where Charles Dickens stayed while writing Nicholas Nickelby and where the Charles Dickens Museum can now be found:

The Best Fiction Books » Classic English Literature

The best charles dickens books, recommended by jenny hartley.

Charles Dickens: An Introduction by Jenny Hartley

He was the most popular novelist of the Victorian era, a convivial family man who always championed the underdog. But he also harboured dark secrets that only came out after his death. Jenny Hartley recommends the best books by and about Charles Dickens and discusses Dickens the phenomenon, past and present.

Interview by Sophie Roell , Editor

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens by Jenny Hartley

Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies by John Bowen and Robert I. Patten

The Best Charles Dickens Books - David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

1 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

2 great expectations by charles dickens, 3 charles dickens: a life by claire tomalin, 4 the selected letters of charles dickens by jenny hartley, 5 palgrave advances in charles dickens studies by john bowen and robert i. patten.

B efore we discuss the books, you’ve been president of the Dickens Fellowship, you’re currently working at the Charles Dickens Museum, and your academic life has focused on Dickens. My first question has to be: how did you get so interested in Charles Dickens ?

I remember being enthralled by an abridged version of David Copperfield as a child. But I was listening to A Tale of Two Cities recently and I guess I find the language a little bit inaccessible. I’m interested in Charles Dickens, but more because of his social criticism and the historical element. Is that true for you as well?

The 19th century is my area so I don’t find the language a block, but I know people do. I found that increasingly with the students before I retired. ‘The sentences are long. The books are long.’ These days people Tweet. It’s about how you meet the written word, and it is sometimes difficult for people.

“That’s what characters in Dickens do: they step out of the novels and they roam the world.”

The great thing people say is, ‘Oh I was put off him at school!’ which is sad. You can read authors too early. Although, when George Orwell read David Copperfield as a nine-year-old, he said he thought it was written by a child because it has that immediacy, that sense of what it is like to be a child, which I think is wonderful.

It’s clearly full of jokes. I sometimes think if he were writing now, I’d find it absolutely hilarious, but because it’s set a hundred years ago, I’m missing quite a few of the references.

I don’t find the humour time-sensitive in that way. There is the social critique you mentioned earlier—he is always for the underdog, he’s a radical—and all that is, of course, terribly moving. But the first thing that always gets me is the humour. It’s pretty sharp, some of it.

So tell me your favourite bit, what makes you laugh the most?

In my book I start with a quote, that bit from Oliver Twist about asking for more. You think, ‘Oh this is going to be so moving!’ but then there’s this reference to the little boy who sleeps next to him, whose father had owned a cook shop. He says he wasn’t used to being hungry and that he’s afraid that one night he might happen to eat the boy lying next to him. And you think, ‘What?’ Suddenly you’re in the world of cannibals. Just a little thing like that. Lots of people can write social critique and they did, but he’s got that angle: you just can’t resist it. It’s a shame that gets lost because otherwise he gets a little bit earnest and worthy. He was earnest, but he was other things as well.

In your book you refer to the extraordinary phenomenon of Charles Dickens—he was the most popular novelist of the Victorian age. Why do you think he was so widely read at the time?

Dickens took great pains to be accessible because he published his books in cheap parts. It meant that you only had to have a shilling a month to read those huge novels. They’re wonderful stories as well. There were public readings, so, at a lodging house, someone would read and you would just listen. Maybe you couldn’t even read yourself, but you could join in. I think the great Dickens phenomenon is about joining in, it is about being part of that whole world of characters. It’s a sort of aura that you’re partaking of, almost.

In your book, you also put emphasis on Charles Dickens’s theatrical work.

Yes, he enjoyed being part of the group, part of the party. He loved parties. His first love was the theatre. He adored it. He wanted to be an actor. In a way, a lot of his characters are performing themselves. He starts from the outside. I think that feeling of being a live gig does energise him.

“He used to drink sherry and egg white, all sorts of things to get himself hyped up.”

Later in life, he did these public readings that must have been electric. We call them readings, which makes them sound a bit flat. They were more one-man shows. He memorised them. He had the book there but he didn’t use it. They must have been absolutely extraordinary: everybody who went said they were.

And these readings were also what killed him?

Yes, his doctor used to say, ‘Oh you must stop this because of your blood pressure.’ In fact, he did die of a stroke so, obviously, his blood pressure was way up there. He overdid it. He did this tour of America in 1867-68 which was the end for him. He died a young man: he was 58.

He wanted to make money, and that was a relatively easy way of doing it—or so he thought—but he also did get energised by it. He used to drink sherry and egg white, all sorts of things to get himself hyped up, and then he had to lie down afterwards, and completely collapse. His doctor told him to stop. He had a farewell tour in London which he actually cut short because he got too ill to finish it. I wish I’d been there.

Another thing that I didn’t know until reading your book is the importance of the illustrations in his books. He paid great attention to those, didn’t he?

Yes, very much so, and he would give very minute instructions to his illustrators. He worked with a lot of illustrators, but for most of his books, the main one was Hablot Knight Browne. Pretty well all of the books had two illustrations a month — very detailed, full of character, loads of characters in them, that feeling of plenitude that you get, of a crowd—just like the novels—and absolutely brilliant.

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In a way, it links with his sense of the visual. When he started writing sketches for newspapers and magazines, he was a journalist. He is always observing, observing, observing with a very minute attention to detail.

He was based here in London , and you get that sense of what London was like. As Walter Bagehot said (in 1858), Dickens describes London “like a special correspondent for posterity.” And he is. You can walk around London with him. How it’s changed! Some of the slum areas he describes with fascination—around Leicester Square and Seven Dials—are quite posh now.

So turning to the books you’re recommending, the first one you’ve chosen is by Charles Dickens. This is David Copperfield , which was first published in 19 one-shilling instalments in 1849. This is the book Dickens himself called his favourite novel and it’s sort of autobiographical, is that right?

It is, yes. David becomes a writer, and is successful. But it’s more about the opening chapters. Just before he wrote David Copperfield , he wrote what is called an ‘autobiographical fragment,’ which he gave to his friend Forster. Forster later incorporated it into his biography. That fragment is really the opening chapters of David Copperfield .

“That famous Victorian imperative: “Make ’em laugh; make ’em cry; make ’em wait.” It does all that in that spades.”

That’s how we know about his prison episode, when his father was in prison for debt. As happened in those days, the whole family would go to prison with you — all except the two oldest children, Charles and his sister. Charles is put to work in a blacking warehouse, pasting labels on bottles of shoe blacking. It was the most terrible experience for him because he thought he’d been abandoned. He felt completely abandoned. You would, wouldn’t you? He was 12 and he just thought, ‘This is it.’ That trauma comes across extremely vividly in David Copperfield .

But it’s not just about that: it’s about that whole experience of the child growing up, the idyll with your mother. Then she remarries because his father dies, and she remarries this monster, Mr Murdstone. The book has got some of the most wonderful characters in it, the nastiest villains and the most charming villains, like Steerforth, who is completely charming and yet awful.

That famous Victorian imperative: “Make ’em laugh; make ’em cry; make ’em wait.” It does all that in that spades. It’s no surprise I would choose it because it’s consistently listed among the top novels of all time. Are you enjoying it?

Yes, I’m listening to it with my children, because we spend quite a lot of time in the car. It’s 36 hours! But a friend of mine, who teaches Victorian literature at Boston University, told me the Audible narrations of Charles Dickens books are really good so I thought I would give it a go. The narrator for David Copperfield is the actor Richard Armitage, and he puts on voices and accents and makes it quite fun, so the kids are enjoying it too. Do most critics see this as his best novel as well?

I think a lot of people do. His critical reception has changed over the years. During his lifetime, people liked the earliest stuff like The Pickwick Papers , which is very funny. I don’t find that so funny. The later ones are the darker ones. David Copperfield is right in the middle of his career.

Freud gave it to his fiancée. It’s about the workings of memory. It has these retrospective chapters, where he looks back. To me, that’s absolutely fascinating.

I think it’s also a very moving book: about how he goes through life, the damage we do, how we grow up. The chapter, for instance, about David’s first drunken outing. He’s drunk in London and goes to the theatre. It’s so funny. Everybody goes through it, you have to drink too much at some point in your life, don’t you? — to know how much you can take. So he goes through those phases, with a great sense of good humour.

He also found it very moving himself, didn’t he? In one of his letters he says it made him cry.

You mention Great Expectations (1860-1), which is the second Charles Dickens book you’ve chosen. When he first talks about writing this novel, he mentions “a very fine, new, and grotesque idea.”

He also talks about making it funny, because the novel before that had been A Tale of Two Cities . Forster must have said to him something along the lines of, ‘It’s absolutely wonderful of course, but not many jokes.’ So Dickens starts this complete masterpiece.

I feel bad that I’ve chosen his two first person novels: none of the other ones were. In a way, it’s revisiting David Copperfield , but it is very different in tone: sadder, more complex. But he does say to Forster, “I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny” — about Pip and Joe, who is his stepfather. The opening of Great Expectations —with the convict, Magwitch—is striking. There have been brilliant film versions of it.

“It is all about class, which is one of the great themes of the British novel.”

It’s a shorter book because it was a weekly. Dickens was running a magazine for the last 20 years of his life and the sales were not doing very well. He had planned Great Expectations as another big novel with monthly instalments. Then he realised he would have to do something to prop up sales of his magazine, so he said, ‘Right! I’ll change it, I’ll do it like this.’ He was really thinking on his feet—he always did—and maybe the conciseness of it suits it.

It is one of the most perfect novels ever written. It’s got a wonderful plot. It’s about good and bad money, you don’t know who Pip’s benefactor is, you’re wrong-footed—as he is—all the time. It’s about terrible damage. It’s got this fantastic suspense about what happens to Magwitch. It’s sad, but also it’s got wonderful humour in it and wonderful characters. It’s got Wemmick, one of the first commuters. It’s just brilliant.

When you say damage, you’re talking about what, in particular?

I’m thinking about Miss Havisham, who’s been jilted at the altar. She is one of the most famous images we have of a damaged person, completely stuck at that moment when she was about to be married in her wedding dress. She’s completely iconic, everybody knows who she is.

That’s what characters in Charles Dickens books do: they step out of the novels and they roam the world. We can recognise quite a lot of them. There aren’t that many writers whose characters do that. I would say maybe Shakespeare is the only other one I can think of. But Dickens is the one with the most characters who can survive outside their pages.

His idea of it being a grotesque idea, is that because Pip thinks he’s being supported by Miss Havisham and then has the shock of finding out that his newfound wealth came from someone he despised?

It certainly could be. Of course class is a huge part of that novel. It is all about class, which is one of the great themes of the British novel. Great Expectations is all about working your way up, as Dickens himself did. And, then, when you get there, was it worth it? What have I done on the way up?

Pip is always checking himself and when the blacksmith, Joe, comes to visit him in London he says, “I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good fellow.” Then he checks himself and says, “I know I was ashamed of him.” It is that honesty, that blurring of ‘I think, no, I know,’ that checking into your feelings, which I think makes the book so powerful.

Do you think it has a happy ending?

It has six different endings. Dickens wrote, originally, a not-happy ending for it, which seems, to me, right. I don’t want to give too much away, but it doesn’t read like a book written by someone who’s had all success showered upon him. It reads like a man who has made peace with his life.

But when he showed the ending to his friend Bulwer-Lytton, who was a much less good novelist than Dickens was—I don’t know why Dickens listened to him, but he did do that, he always listened to his readers—Bulwer-Lytton said, ‘It’s too sad, you must change it.’ So the ending that we have is deliberately ambiguous. You can read it how you like.

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We’ve talked quite a lot about Charles Dickens as a person already. Your next choice is a biography: Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. It’s quite long, some 500 pages. Then I looked up a Guardian review which talked of “Claire Tomalin’s unrivalled talent for telling a story and keeping a reader enthralled: long as the book is, I wanted more.” Is it a real page turner?

Yes, absolutely. She is such a good biographer. I would read anything by her. She’s so intelligent. She is sympathetic to him but she is not blind to him. She had already written a book called The Invisible Woman about Dickens’s affair with Nelly Ternan, a young actress. In this book she writes about his whole life brilliantly, to my way of thinking. There are other biographies — I do think Michael Slater’s huge one , which is about Dickens’s writing life, is absolutely superb. But Claire’s is shorter and she opens it out more.

“People always say, ‘Oh, he was horrible to his wife.’ Well he was.”

She gets his energy, his ferocity. He could be callous. People always say, ‘Oh, he was horrible to his wife.’ Well he was. He chucked her out of the family home when the youngest child was only 6. He said she was a terrible mother, but we have no evidence of that, at all. So he did behave badly. I’m afraid that when marriages break down, people do.

She doesn’t blink that, but, at the same time, she does have this sense of a man who wants to do good, who believes that he can do good, and who, above all, is committed to his writing — which he absolutely was. She ends the book with this wonderful image of him writing late into the night. Sometimes he would ask the office boy to bring a bucket of water and he would put his hands and his head in it and then go on writing. That was his focus.

What do you think drove him?

He’d always loved stories. There’s a wonderful bit in David Copperfield about his childhood reading — all the characters who came to join him in his solitude after his mother made this horrible remarriage. He was always that bookish child. I suppose I think—and Claire Tomalin does as well—that there’s this thing called genius. You don’t really know where it comes from, but it just alights.

His desire to help the poor, that’s driven by the fact he suffered personally, isn’t it?

Definitely, that sense of, ‘There but for the grace of God, go I.’ If he hadn’t been yanked out of it, he could have been one of those children on the streets. He was a compulsive walker, and knew the streets of London like nobody else, he says. And he would see those children, those young people on his walks. He often walked at night. He knew that it was a very precarious thing. It’s that sense of precariousness—I could be on the streets, I could be in prison—that led him to help the women at Urania Cottage, which he helped set up. That sense of, ‘Yes, that could be me.’ And also, that you could help them, that it’s not irrevocable, they can be brought back.

So how much of on an impact did he have in terms of improving people’s lives?

His big ally in all this was Angela Burdett-Coutts. She was a philanthropist and inherited a share of Coutts bank, so she was very wealthy. They were friends. They joined forces on her causes, like the Ragged Schools, which were schools for the very poor. She was his partner in Urania Cottage. How much influence he had, you can never tell, but people said that he was one of the great influences of the time.

“He believed in the values of Christianity, of helping your neighbour and the essential goodness of people.”

If you think how popular A Christmas Carol was, and still is. That’s about helping the poor and the ‘worthy poor’ as they were known then. You should be decent.

And examine yourself at Christmas — because we all have elements of Scrooge.

Exactly so. And the idea of instant conversion, of New Year’s resolutions, that we can turn ourselves around. It’s a hugely popular book. He was a Christian, in a non-doctrinaire sense. He believed in the values of Christianity, of helping your neighbour and the essential goodness of people, really.

You emphasize Christmas in your own book about Dickens.

Yes, there’s a bit about Christmas because he is so associated with Christmas. When he died, a girl who worked in Covent Garden asked, “Will Father Christmas die too?” Even now you’ll find productions of A Christmas Carol everywhere at Christmas. There’s a wonderful muppets version.

Why are Charles Dickens books so associated with Christmas, is it because A Christmas Carol was so popular at the time?

Yes, partly. It also coincided with Christmas becoming more commercialised. Christmas trees came in in the 1840s. Prince Albert, who came from Germany, brought some Christmas traditions with him — like Christmas cards. There had always been a Christmas holiday, but a lot of the rituals we associate with Christmas really start to build up at that time. He did Christmas books after A Christmas Carol and other people did too. I don’t think there was much of a tradition of it before then.

Why do you think Charles Dickens’s books have been performed so much and in so many different ways?

He gives you characters who are very welcoming to inhabit. They are very big. With Scrooge, you can inhabit the miser and he is melodramatic. His characters have that hugeness of melodrama, that emotional affect — because melodrama is very emotional. You root for people: the goody and the baddy. He deliberately embraces that popular form.

I think my first introduction to Dickens wasn’t a book, but a production of Oliver Twist .

Your next book is The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens , which you edited and came out in 2012. I thought he had burned all his letters?

He burned all the letters that were sent to him, but obviously you can’t burn letters that you’ve sent to other people — because you haven’t got them anymore. But he said he would have burned those too, if he could have. He had a huge bonfire in 1860, just after his marriage collapsed. One critic said it must have been the most expensive bonfire of all time. Just think of all the people who were writing to him. He knew everyone.

He adored writing letters. He said he wrote about a dozen a day. To get a letter from him was like getting a gift and you would keep it. There are letters, in that collection, from chimney sweeps, from clock menders. They’re always funny, with jokes in them. We’ve got over 14,000 but there must have been many more. We know of whole collections that were destroyed, in things like the Blitz, for instance. Ones to his daughter Katey went up in a warehouse fire.

“Other men in his circle kept mistresses but he had to keep that side of his life secret because he was Mr. Family Values”

The first letter is from when he’s gone back to school after the blacking warehouse. He’s only about 13, and it’s to a friend about borrowing a dictionary. It’s got a joke about a wooden leg. Dickens adored wooden legs. There are loads of joke about wooden legs in his letters and novels. We probably don’t find wooden leg jokes funny anymore because we’re too PC, but he just thought they were very funny. It’s a bit of your body but it is not you. Where are the boundaries of the body? That kind of thing intrigues him. They’ve got this letter at the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street. It’s just a tiny fragment, but it is amazing to me that it survived — a letter from a 13-year-old school boy. Why would you keep that? It’s just a note. But it survived and there it is.

He was writing letters continually until his death. We’ve got letters that he wrote the day he died. Apart from that autobiographical fragment, he never wrote an autobiography. He said he would one day, but he never did. He was quite a secretive person. He didn’t tell his children about the blacking warehouse or the prison or anything like that.

He didn’t tell them?

No, it was a secret. Well, I can see that if you’ve been in prison, you’re not keen to talk about it, necessarily. So his children didn’t know about it until after he died. He’d given that autobiographical fragment just to Forster, he didn’t give it to anybody else. I think his wife knew, but nobody else.

So it’s through his letters that you are given these wonderful glimpses, it’s Dickens by Dickens, if you like. You’re really up close to his life, which is lived so intensely. The amount of invitations! You could have a selection which was just invitations. One of my favourite letters to Forster just says something like, ‘Come at 6, chops await you.’ He was such a convivial man.

How can somebody who’s writing a dozen letters a day be secretive?

About his personal life. He kept Nelly, his mistress, secret. Other men in his circle kept mistresses, but he had to keep that side of his life secret because he was Mr. Family Values. So he was living a double life, towards the end of his life.

So at the time, people reading David Copperfield didn’t know that Dickens was writing partly from personal experience?

They had no idea. It was a novel, he’s just made it up. It only came out a couple of years after he died, when Forster wrote a biography of him. Dickens knew Forster was going to write it — he’d sort of appointed him. Forster says that now the world will know that behind this great genius lay this very precarious and difficult childhood.

Also, in Dickens’s will, the first legacy is to Ellen Ternan. So he knew that that would come out too after he died. It doesn’t say ‘to my mistress’ but he leaves 1000 pounds to her. So people would ask, ‘who is she?’ For many years, Dickensians would say she was a ‘family friend’ or something like that, but gradually the evidence built up till it is, now, absolutely certain that she was his mistress.

Did he live with her after he left his wife?

It was a secret life. He had this wonderful family house in Gadshill in Kent, which he’d always wanted to buy. When he was a child, they’d go past this house and his father said, ‘Oh one day you might earn enough to live there.’ This was the myth, anyway, that Dickens told. So he did buy this house and you can visit it in Kent. He also had a flat above the office in London.

But he also had a series of houses that he rented under the name Charles Tringham for Nelly to live in and he would visit her. They were in Slough and in Peckham. He worked the railway timetables. He wanted quick journeys up and down from London. And they had trips to Paris. They had a house they lived in outside Boulogne.

So he continued living with his wife?

No, she was expelled in 1858. From then on, Dickens lived either above the office in Wellington Street in London or in Gadshill, where his children lived. They had had a big London house, which they gave up the lease of, in Tavistock Square. It was a very divided life. In the novel he wrote in 1859, A Tale of Two Cities , he talks about how we all have secret lives. He talks about how when he goes into a city, how amazing it is to think of all these secrets in every house. You bet!

He exchanges letters with Queen Victoria as well, doesn’t he? Or at least her adviser.

When you think how famous he was actually, he wasn’t honoured in the way that we would honour writers now. There’s a wonderful quote about Oliver Twist in her diary, she’s trying to get her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, to read it and he says ‘Oh no, I don’t like such things.’ But much later, right towards the end of his life, her equerry arranges an audience with Queen Victoria. He’s such a radical, but, on the other hand, he was obviously very pleased to go. There seems to have been a suggestion that he would have been given some honour, but he died quite soon after.

What do you make of the letters he writes to his children?

He loved them when they were little, and when they get older…it’s very difficult to have a famous father. He would say things like, ‘When I was your age, I had to earn my living.’ He obviously started work very early, as a solicitor’s clerk and a journalist. He sends a couple of them out to the colonies. They went to Australia. One of them was only 16 when he went. I think it was a great pressure on them, really. I think it was easier to be a daughter than a son.

I read the one where he’s writing about his son Sydney saying, ‘Oh, he’s as good as dead.’

He was the one who went to sea. He writes about him so affectionately and so movingly when he was younger. People think he’s trying to write Sydney off but he had been ill. He did die soon after Dickens.

I got that impression—that he was sick—but it was an odd way for somebody to be writing about a sick child.

As your last book you’ve chosen a work of criticism: Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies (2006), which says, in the introduction, that it’s an exciting time to be studying Charles Dickens.

I’ve chosen a collection of essays because it gives you lots of different ways into Dickens. It includes some of the best critics who are writing at the moment: the editors, John Bowen and Robert Patten are both excellent. These are some of the best Dickens critics collected in one volume. You also get all these different aspects, like “Psychoanalyzing Dickens” by Carolyn Dever.

If you were going to read one critical book, this would be a good one to have. Some critical stuff can weigh you down a bit, but this one is written very accessibly. Each person writes very clearly. They are also excited by Dickens — and that comes across really well. Particularly, for instance, some aspects that had maybe got a bit muted, like the visual that we were talking about earlier.

Is there one essay in the book that you particularly love?

I think Rosemarie Bodenheimer is an absolutely terrific critic of Charles Dickens. Her chapter is, “Dickens and the Writing of a Life.” She talks about the energy of Dickens and uses the letters as a lens to look at the novels. She’s done a whole book on that and she does it quite briefly here, but she writes about him really intelligently. She looks back through past critics. Some of the best ones were actually novelists themselves. George Gissing, the novelist, wrote terribly well about Dickens and so did GK Chesterton. They really get him, and I think she does as well.

Because he was quite extraordinary. It was Peter Ackroyd who wrote about “the essential strangeness of the man” and I think a lot of these critics get into that in different ways. He really is a novelist like no other, and, in a way, you need lots of critics to give you different angles on that and, in this book, they do.

A lot of people have criticised Dickens, because he can’t do interior, he can’t do psychology. Yes, he is not George Eliot, but he does it from the outside in. So he gives you people’s tics, their way of behaving. We talk about body language quite happily now, but Victorians didn’t. We understand how to read somebody from the outside. That’s a great gift that he has given to us, if you like. Malcolm Andrews talks about that really well. So you can read a character by what they are wearing, how they speak, the little tics of behaviour. Other novelists pay tribute to Dickens for doing that.

I don’t see why it should necessarily be better to be inside someone’s head rather than looking in from the outside.

We’ve had a whole thing of going into people’s heads, George Elio t gave us people’s inside, as did Henry James —at great length—the minute turns of thought. Dickens didn’t do that. Maybe now we can see it again, but of course his length is against him. If you were to give someone an 800-page novel, they would flinch.

The word ‘picaresque’ comes up quite a bit in works of criticism on Dickens.

Yes, the idea of journeying, being episodic. I actually think he had a much tighter hold on the plot than that. Sometimes the plots are a bit ridiculous— these wills that suddenly turn up, somebody’s third grandchild has inherited—but I think he wants to show that there is a plan to the world. Maybe it goes back to religion, but there is a shape and a meaning.

Dickens , I suppose, went out of fashion because he says, ‘No, we are all connected. In Bleak House he famously says, ‘What can be the connection between all these people in London?’ And he shows there is a connection, a moral connection. In that book, the connection is partly through disease. We can affect each other that way so we are connected in a very real way. The character at the bottom of society can infect the character at the top of society, and our actions do have consequences.

The word ‘picaresque’ suggests something that goes on and on like a soap opera. His books have been compared to soap operas. Which, in a way, is great. They do have that melodramatic aspect, it’s a popular form. But they also have shape and a universe and a meaning. Everything belongs, everything fits together.

December 9, 2016

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Jenny Hartley

Jenny Hartley is a former president of the Dickens Fellowship and Professor at the University of Roehampton.

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The Top 10 Charles Dickens Books

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens is an outstanding biography of the writer with an eye toward his children, including the scandalous possible existence of an 11th child, born to Dickens's mistress. Robert Gottlieb, former Knopf editor, New Yorker editor, and lifelong Dickens reader, gives us the 10 best books from the master. For more on the book, check out our Q&A with Gottlieb .

Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world everyone would read all of them. (Well, maybe not – Barnaby Rudge is a tired and tiresome historical novel that the young Dickens kept putting off writing until contractual obligations forced him to finish it.) His first published book was Sketches by Boz – a collection of short pieces that brought him considerable attention. By the time he was finished with his second book – The Pickwick Papers , serialized between March, 1836 and October, 1837 – he was, at twenty-five, the best-known writer in England, and such he remained until his death, at fifty-eight, in 1870. The energy, the fun, the power, the compassion of his work is unmatched in English literature, with the obvious.

How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity. Perhaps his most widely known works are A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities , and both are wonderful, but they don’t make my own top ten list. Instead:

1. Great Expectations - With its thrilling story that is also a profound look at the moral education of a boy who has been persecuted and deceived but whose essential goodness of heart eventually rescues him from snobbery and delusion. Everything is in harmony in this almost perfect novel: the character of Pip himself, and his interaction with the immense figures of the convict Magwitch, the embittered and half-mad Miss Havisham, and the beautiful, cold Estella. This is Dickens’s most finely crafted book, and his most moving.

2. Our Mutual Friend - His final complete novel, with its vast panoply of characters, its emotional generosity, its violent drama, its rich humor – and its author’s most likeable (because imperfect) heroine, Bella Wilfer. I’ve actually read this book aloud twice, and still find it irresistible.

3. David Copperfield - Of course – the book closest to Dickens’s heart (it’s not by accident that the hero’s initials reverse Dickens’s own). The first-person narrative sweeps you along, and the characters -- from the wicked Murdstones and conniving Uriah Heep to the warm-hearted if feckless Micawbers, from Aunt Betsey Trotwood, Little Em’ly, and Steerforth, her seducer and betrayer, to the stout-hearted Peggoty and the silly lovable Dora, whom David marries – are indelibly printed on our literary consciousness. (Among its greatest admirers: Tolstoy, Kafka, and Virginal Woolf.)

4. Bleak House - With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, Bleak House is for many readers Dickens’s greatest novel. An assault on the legal system, a satire on foolish philanthropy, a gripping melodrama, and an interesting use of point of view (told in both the third and first persons), it is a perpetual fascination.

5. Little Dorrit - In some ways Dickens’s most personal if not autobiographical novel, it has an autumnal quality, given its aging hero and quiet, staunch heroine. Its central characters not only prevail but mature, and its situations – even its comedy – resonate for its readers in countless affecting ways.

6. Oliver Twist - With its larger-than-life villainies and its endless excitements, is the perfect book to begin with. Who will ever forget the supremely wicked Fagin who co-opts homeless boys into a life of crime, the murderous Bill Sikes, the brave young Oliver himself, however idealized? No wonder it had such an immense triumph as successor to the benign and lovable Pickwick!

7. Nicholas Nickleby - Perhaps the most high-spirited of all Dickens’s novels, yet also a grim, devastating attack on the Yorkshire schools to which unwanted children were dispatched. The comically radiant picaresque adventures of young Nicholas with the Crummles traveling theatrical troupe provide a wonderful contrast to the tragedy of the boy Smike, the saddest victim of the Squeers family who run the unspeakable school called Dotheboys Hall.

8. Dombey and Son - A powerful tragedy of a distant, cold businessman who comes to realize too late the value of his worthy daughter, Florence, after the death of his beloved son, Paul – Dickens’s most famous death scene after that of the famous Little Nell of The Old Curiosity Shop .

9. The Pickwick Papers - And, yes, Pickwick itself – not quite a novel (it started out as a series of sketches to be illustrated) but filled with glorious characters – the benign, naïve Pickwick himself, his cockney valet Sam Weller (who steals the book; the Sancho Panza to Pickwick’s Don Quixote), the rascally Jingle – and hilarious episodes like Pickwick’s trial for breach of promise. The most decisive debut in English fiction.

10. The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens - Finally, not a work of fiction but the recently published The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens , edited by Jenny Hartley from the twelve volumes of the monumental Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s correspondence. Here you find in Dickens the man, all the fun, acuity, sensitivity, and tough realism that characterize Dickens the supreme novelist.

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Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was a British author who penned the beloved classics Oliver Twist , A Christmas Carol , David Copperfield , and Great Expectations .

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Who Was Charles Dickens?

Charles Dickens was a British author, journalist, editor, illustrator, and social commentator who wrote the beloved classics Oliver Twist , A Christmas Carol , and Great Expectations . His books were first published in monthly serial installments, which became a lucrative source of income following a childhood of abject poverty. Dickens wrote 15 novels in total, including Nicholas Nickleby , David Copperfield , and A Tale of Two Cities . His writing provided a stark portrait of poor and working class people in the Victorian era that helped to bring about social change. Dickens died in June 1870 at age 58 and is remembered as one of the most important and influential writers of the 19 th century.

Quick Facts

Early life and education, life as a journalist, editor, and illustrator, personal life: wife and children, charles dickens’ books: 'oliver twist,' 'great expectations,' and more, travels to the united states, 'a christmas carol' and other works, pop culture adaptations.

FULL NAME: Charles John Huffam Dickens BORN: February 7, 1812 DIED: June 9, 1870 BIRTHPLACE: Portsmouth, England SPOUSE: Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1836-1870) CHILDREN: Charles Jr., Mary, Kate, Walter, Francis, Alfred, Sydney, Henry, Dora, and Edward ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth on the southern coast of England. He was the second of eight children born to John Dickens, a naval clerk who dreamed of striking it rich, and Elizabeth Barrow, who aspired to be a teacher and school director. Despite his parents’ best efforts, the family remained poor but nevertheless happy in the early days.

In 1816, they moved to Chatham, Kent, where young Dickens and his siblings were free to roam the countryside and explore the old castle at Rochester. Dickens was a sickly child and prone to spasms, which prevented him from playing sports. He compensated by reading avidly, including such books as Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones , Peregrine Pickle , and The Arabian Nights , according to The World of Charles Dickens by Fido Martin.

In 1822, the Dickens family moved to Camden Town, a poor neighborhood in London. By then, the family’s financial situation had grown dire, as Charles’ father had a dangerous habit of living beyond the family’s means. Eventually, John was sent to prison for debt in 1824, when Charles was just 12 years old. He boarded with a sympathetic family friend named Elizabeth Roylance, who later inspired the character Mrs. Pipchin in Dickens’ 1847 novel Dombey and Son , according to Dickens: A Biography by Fred Kaplan.

Following his father’s imprisonment, Dickens was forced to leave school to work at a boot-blacking factory alongside the River Thames. At the run-down, rodent-ridden factory, Dickens earned 6 shillings a week labeling pots of “blacking,” a substance used to clean fireplaces. It was the best he could do to help support his family, and the strenuous working conditions heavily influenced his future writing and his views on treatment of the poor and working class.

Much to his relief, Dickens was permitted to go back to school when his father received a family inheritance and used it to pay off his debts. He attended the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he encountered what he called “haphazard, desultory teaching [and] poor discipline,” according to The World of Charles Dickens by Angus Wilson. The school’s sadistic headmaster was later the inspiration for the character Mr. Creakle in Dickens’ semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield .

charles dickens sitting at a desk, he holds a quill above a piece of paper and looks down, he wears a suit

When Dickens was 15, his education was pulled out from under him once again. In 1827, he had to drop out of school and work as an office boy to contribute to his family’s income. However, as it turned out, the job became a launching point for his writing career. Within a year of being hired, Dickens began freelance reporting at the law courts of London. Just a few years later, he was reporting for two major London newspapers.

In 1833, he began submitting sketches to various magazines and newspapers under the pseudonym “Boz,” which was a family nickname. His first published story was “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” which ran in London’s Monthly Magazine in 1833. Seeing his writing in print made his eyes “overflow with joy and pride,” according to Dickens: A Biography . In 1836, his clippings were published in his first book, Sketches by Boz.

Dickens later edited magazines including Household Words and All the Year Round , the latter of which he founded. In both, he promoted and originally published some of his own work such as Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities .

charles dickens sits in the front of a carriage next to his wife catherine hogarth dickens, two other girls are also seated in the carriage, a man wearing a tall top hat stands next to the horse attached to the carriage

Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836, soon after the publication of his first book, Sketches by Boz . She was the daughter of George Hogarth, the editor of the Evening Chronicle . Dickens and Hogarth went on to have 10 children between 1837 and 1852, according to biographer Fred Kaplan. Among them were magazine editor Charles Dickens Jr., painter Kate Dickens Perugini, barrister Henry Fielding Dickens, and Edward Dickens, who entered into politics after immigrating to the Australia.

In 1851, Dickens suffered two devastating losses: the deaths of his infant daughter, Dora, and his father, John. He also separated from his wife in 1858. Dickens slandered Catherine publicly and struck up an intimate relationship with a young actor named Ellen “Nelly” Ternan. Sources differ on whether the two started seeing each other before or after Dickens’ marital separation. It is also believed that he went to great lengths to erase any documentation alluding to Ternan’s presence in his life. These major losses and challenges seeped into Dickens’ writing in his “dark novel” period.

a color rendering of oliver twist holding a bowl and asking the headmaster for more porridge, with other children watching in surprise from a table behind him

Best known for his fiction writing, Dickens wrote a total of 15 novels between 1836 and 1870. His first was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club , and his last was The Mystery of Edwin Drood , which went unfinished due to his death.

Dickens’ books were originally published in monthly serial installments that sold for 1 shilling each. The affordable price meant everyday citizens could follow along, though wealthier readers, such as Queen Victoria , were also among Dickens’ fans. Once complete, the stories were published again in novel form.

Dickens’ books provided a stark portrait of poor and working class people in the Victorian era that helped to bring about social change. In the 1850s, following the death of his father and infant daughter, as well as his separation from his wife, Dickens’ novels began to express a darkened worldview. His so-called dark novels are Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1857). They feature more complicated, thematically grim plots and more complex characters, though Dickens didn’t stray from his typical societal commentary.

Read more about each of Charles Dickens’ novels below:

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

Serial Publication: April 1836 to November 1837 Novel Publication: 1837

In 1836, the same year his first book of illustrations released, Dickens started publishing The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club . His series, originally written as captions for artist Robert Seymour’s humorous sports-themed illustrations, took the form of monthly serial installments. It was wildly popular with readers, and Dickens’ captions proved even more popular than the illustrations they were meant to accompany.

Oliver Twist

Serial Publication: February 1837 to March 1839 Novel Publication: November 1838

While still working on The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club , Dickens began Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress , which would prove to be one of his most popular novels. The book follows the life of an orphan living in the streets of London, where he must get by on his wits and falls in with a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the dastardly Fagin.

Oliver Twist unromantically portrayed the mistreatment of London orphans, and the slums and poverty described in the novel made for biting social satire. Although very different from the humorous tone of the Pickwick Papers , Oliver Twist was extremely well-received in both England and America, and dedicated readers eagerly anticipated each next monthly installment, according to the biography Charles Dickens by Harold & Miriam Maltz. Even the young Queen Victoria was an avid reader of Oliver Twist , describing it as “excessively interesting.”

Nicholas Nickleby

Serial Publication: April 1838 to October 1839 Novel Publication: 1839

As Dickens was still finishing Oliver Twist , he again began writing his follow-up work in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby . It tells the story of the title character, who must support his mother and sister following the loss of their comfortable lifestyle when his father dies and the family loses all of their money.

The Old Curiosity Shop

Serial Publication: April 1840 to February 1841 Novel Publication: 1841

Taking a few months between projects this time, Dickens’ next serial was The Old Curiosity Shop . Protagonist Nell Trent lives with her grandfather, whose gambling costs them the titular shop. The pair struggles to survive after into hiding to avoid a money lender.

Barnaby Rudge

Serial Publication: February to November 1841 Novel Publication: 1841

Right on the heels of The Old Curiosity Shop came Barnaby Rudge . The historical fiction novel, Dickens’ first, follows Barnaby and depicts the chaos of mob violence. The author originated the idea years prior but is thought to have temporarily abandoned it due to a dispute with his publisher.

Martin Chuzzlewit

Serial Publication: January 1843 to July 1844 Novel Publication: 1844

After his first American tour, Dickens wrote The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit . The story is about a man’s struggle to survive on the ruthless American frontier.

Dombey and Son

Serial Publication: October 1846 to April 1848 Novel Publication: 1848

After an uncharacteristic break, Dickens returned with Dombey and Son , which centers on the theme of how business tactics affect a family’s personal finances. Published as a novel in 1848, it takes a dark view of England and is considered pivotal to Dickens’ body of work in that it set the tone for his future novels.

David Copperfield

Serial Publication: May 1849 to November 1850 Novel Publication: November 1850

Dickens wrote his most autobiographical novel to date with David Copperfield by tapping into his own personal experiences in his difficult childhood and his work as a journalist. The book follows the life of its title character from his impoverished childhood to his maturity and success as a novelist. It was the first work of its kind: No one had ever written a novel that simply followed a character through his everyday life.

David Copperfield is considered one of Dickens’ masterpieces, and it was his personal favorite of his works; he wrote in the book’s preface, “Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.” It also helped define the public’s expectations of a Dickensian novel. In The Life of Charles Dickens , biographer John Forster wrote “Dickens never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of Copperfield ,” and biographer Fred Kaplan called the novel “an exploration of himself through his art more direct, more honest, more resolute than in his earlier fiction.”

Bleak House

Serial Publication: 1852 to 1853 Novel Publication: 1853

His next work, Bleak House , dealt with the hypocrisy of British society. The first of his “dark novels,” it was considered his most complex novel yet. Drawing upon his brief experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, the novel is built around a long-running legal case involving several conflicting wills and was described by biographer Fido Martin as “England’s greatest satire on the law’s incompetence and delays.” Dickens’ satire was so effective that it helped support a successful movement toward legal reform in the 1870s.

Serial Publication: April to August 1854 Novel Publication: 1854

Dickens followed Bleak House with Hard Times , which takes place in an industrial town at the peak of economic expansion. Hard Times focuses on the shortcomings of employers as well as those who seek change.

Little Dorrit

Serial Publication: December 1855 and June 1857 Novel Publication: 1857

Another novel from Dickens’ darker period is Little Dorrit , a fictional study of how human values conflict with the world’s brutality.

A Tale of Two Cities

Serial Publication: April to November 1959 Novel Publication: 1859

Coming out of his “dark novel” period, Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in the periodical he founded, All the Year Round . The historical novel takes place during the French Revolution in Paris and London. Its themes focus on the need for sacrifice, the struggle between the evils inherent in oppression and revolution, and the possibility of resurrection and rebirth.

A Tale of Two Cities was a tremendous success and remains Dickens’ best-known work of historical fiction. Biographer Fido Martin called the novel “pure Dickens, but essentially a Dickens we have never seen before. This is a Dickens who has at last captured in prose fiction the stage heroics he adored.”

Great Expectations

Serial Publication: December 1860 to August 1861 Novel Publication: October 1861

Many people consider Great Expectations Dickens’ greatest literary accomplishment. The story—Dickens’ second that’s narrated in the first person—focuses on the lifelong journey of moral development for the novel’s protagonist, an orphan named Pip. With extreme imagery and colorful characters, the well-received novel touches on wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and good versus evil. The novel was a financial success and received nearly universal acclaim, with readers responding positively to the novel’s themes of love, morality, social mobility, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.

Our Mutual Friend

Serial Publication: May 1864 to November 1865 Novel Publication: 1865

In June 1865, Dickens was a passenger on a train that plunged off a bridge in Kent, according to biographer Fred Kaplan. He tended to the wounded and even saved the lives of some passengers before assistance arrived, and he was able to retrieve his unfinished manuscript for his next novel, Our Mutual Friend , from the wreckage. That book, a satire about wealth and the Victorian working class, wasn’t received as well as Dickens’ other works, with some finding the plot too complex and disorganized.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Serial Publication: April 1870 Novel Publication: 1870

Dickins’ final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood , began its monthly serialized publication in April 1870. However, Dickens died less than two months later, leaving the novel unfinished. Only six of a planned 12 installments of his final work were completed at the time of his death, according to biographer Fido Martin.

two men sit on a stagecoach carriage attached to a horse

In 1842, Dickens and his wife, Catherine, embarked on a five-month lecture tour of the United States. Dickens spoke of his opposition to slavery and expressed his support for additional reform. His lectures, which began in Virginia and ended in Missouri, were so widely attended that ticket scalpers gathered outside his events. Biographer J.B. Priestley wrote that during the tour, Dickens enjoyed “the greatest welcome that probably any visitor to America has ever had.”

“They flock around me as if I were an idol,” bragged Dickens, a known show-off. Although he enjoyed the attention at first, he eventually resented the invasion of privacy. He was also annoyed by what he viewed as Americans’ gregariousness and crude habits, as he later expressed in American Notes for General Circulation (1842). The sarcastic travelogue, which Dickens’ penned upon his return to England, criticized American culture and materialism.

After his criticism of the American people during his first tour, Dickens later launched a second U.S. tour from 1867 to 1868, where he hoped to set things right with the public and made charismatic speeches promising to praise the United States in reprints of American Notes for General Circulation and Martin Chuzzlewit , his 1844 novel set in the American frontier.

a color rendering of ebenezer scrooge sitting in a chair next to a fireplace, looking startled as a ghost walks toward him, wearing chains around his body

On December 19, 1843, Dickens published A Christmas Carol , one of his most timeless and beloved works. The book features the famous protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge, a curmudgeonly old miser who—with the help of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come—finds the holiday spirit. Dickens penned the book in just six weeks, beginning in October and finishing just in time for Christmas celebrations. Like his earlier works, it was intended as a social criticism, to bring attention to the hardships faced by England’s poorer classes.

The book was a roaring success, selling more than 6,000 copies upon publication. Readers in England and America were touched by the book’s empathetic emotional depth; one American entrepreneur reportedly gave his employees an extra day’s holiday after reading it. Despite its incredible success, the high production costs and Dickens’ disagreements with the publisher meant he received relatively few profits for A Christmas Carol , according to Kaplan, which were further reduced when Dickens was forced to take legal action against the publishers for making illegal copies.

A Christmas Carol was Dickens’ most popular book in the United States, selling more than two million copies in the century after its first publication there, according to Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. It is also one of Dickens’ most adapted works, and Ebenezer Scrooge has been portrayed by such actors as Michael Caine, Albert Finney, Patrick Stewart, Tim Curry, and Jim Carrey .

Dickens published several other Christmas novellas following A Christmas Carol , including The Chimes (1844) The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost ’s Bargain (1848). In 1867, he wrote a stage play titled No Thoroughfare .

On June 8, 1870, Dickens had a stroke at his home in Kent, England, after a day of writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood . He died the next day at age 58.

At the time, Edwin Drood had begun its serial publication; it was never finished. Only half of the planned installments of his final novel were completed at the time of Dickens’ death, according to Fido.

Dickens was buried in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey , with thousands of mourners gathering at the beloved author’s gravesite.

When 48 Doughty Street in London—which was Dickens’ home from 1837 to 1839—was threatened with demolition, it was saved by the Dickens Fellowship and renovated, becoming the Dickens House Museum . Open since 1925, it appears like a middle-class Victorian home exactly as Dickens lived in it, and it houses a significant collection related to Dickens and his works.

a black and white publicity still from the film oliver featuring two young actors in period costumes sitting on stone steps and looking off camera

Many of Dickens’ major works have been adapted for movies and stage plays, with some, like A Christmas Carol , repackaged in various forms over the years. Reginald Owen portrayed Ebenezer Scrooge in one of the earliest Hollywood adaptations of the novella in 1938, while Albert Finney played the character alongside Alec Guinness as Marley’s ghost in the 1970 film Scrooge .

Some adaptations have taken unique approaches to the source material. Michael Caine portrayed Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), with members of the Muppets playing other characters from the story, and Gonzo the Great portraying Dickens as a narrator. Bill Murray played a version of Scrooge in a modern-day comedic take on the classic story. Several animated versions of A Christmas Carol have also been adapted, with Jim Carrey playing Scrooge in a 2009 computer-generated film that used motion-capture animation to create the character.

Several more of Dickens’ works have been similarly adapted. Famed director David Lean made celebrated adaptations of both Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The latter novel was also adapted into a successful 1960 stage musical called Oliver! , and a 1968 movie version—directed by Carol Reed—of that same musical won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Director.

More recently, The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) put a comedic spin on Dickens’ personal favorite of his own works, with Dev Patel performing the title role. Barbara Kingsolver also adapted the novel in her Pulitzer Prize winner Demon Copperhead (2022).

The English are, as far as I know, the hardest worked people on whom the sun shines. Be content if in their wretched intervals of leisure they read for amusement and do no worse.
I write because I can’t help it.
Literature cannot be too faithful to the people, cannot too ardently advocate the cause of their advancement, happiness, and prosperity.
An author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him forever.
Nobody has done more harm in this single generation than everybody can mend in 10 generations.
If I were soured [on writing], I should still try to sweeten the lives and fancies of others; but I am not—not at all.
Well, the work is hard, the climate is hard, the life is hard: but so far the gain is enormous.
Who that has ever reflected on the enormous and vast amount of leave-taking there is in life can ever have doubted the existence of another?
I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt, till I traveled in America.
My great ambition is to live in the hearts and homes of home-loving people and to be connected with the truth of the truthful English life.

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ARTS & CULTURE

The essentials: charles dickens.

What are the must-read books written by and about the famed British author?

Megan Gambino

Senior Editor

One of the most-read authors of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens wrote over a dozen novels in his career, as well as short stories, plays and nonfiction. He is probably best known for his memorable cast of characters, including Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.

Becoming Dickens , a biography released in 2011 in time for the 200th anniversary of his birth, chronicles the writer’s meteoric rise from relative obscurity as a journalist to one of England’s most adored novelists. Here, the book’s author, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, recommends five novels by Dickens and five additional books that offer insight into the writer and his work.

The Pickwick Papers (1836)

In Charles Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers , Samuel Pickwick, the founder of the Pickwick Club in London, and three of the group’s members—Nathaniel Winkle, Augustus Snodgrass and Tracy Tupman—travel around the English countryside. Sam Weller, a cockney who speaks in proverbs, joins the party as Mr. Pickwick’s assistant, adding more comedy to their adventures, which include romances, hunting outings, a costume party and jail stays.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: This started out as a collection of monthly comic sketches and only slowly developed into something more like a novel. A huge craze at the time of its original publication in 1836-37—it produced as many commercial spinoffs as any modern film—it still has the power to reduce a reader to tears of laughter. As a comic double-act, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller are as immortal as Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello.

Oliver Twist (1837-39)

When orphan Oliver Twist loses a bet and brazenly asks for more gruel, he is kicked out of his workhouse and sent to serve as an apprentice to an undertaker. On the run after a scuffle with another of the undertaker’s apprentices, Oliver Twist meets Jack Dawkins, or the Artful Dodger, who brings him into a gang of pickpockets trained by a criminal named Fagin.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: “Please, sir, I want some more”—When Dickens wrote that at the start of his first fully planned novel, he was probably hoping that the sentiment would be echoed by his readers. He wasn’t disappointed. His waif-like hero may be a little passive for modern tastes, but Oliver’s adventures with Fagin and the Artful Dodger quickly passed from fiction into folklore. There may be fewer jokes than in The Pickwick Papers , but Dickens’ satire on attitudes toward poverty remains as relevant as ever.

A Christmas Carol (1843)

Ebenezer Scrooge’s deceased business partner Jacob Marley and three other spirits—the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—visit him in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol . The spirits tour Scrooge through scenes of past and present holidays. He even gets a preview of what is in store for him should he continue on his miserly ways. Scared straight, he wakes from the dream a new man, joyful and benevolent.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: This isn’t a novel, strictly speaking, but it is still one of the most influential stories ever written. Since A Christmas Carol ’s first appearance in 1843, it has been reproduced in so many different forms, from Marcel Marceau to the Muppets, that it is now as much a part of Christmas as turkey or presents, while words like “Scrooge” are deeply rooted in the national psyche. At once funny and touching, it has become one of our most powerful modern myths.

Great Expectations (1860-61)

This is the story of Pip, an orphan who has eyes for Estrella, a girl of a higher class. He receives a fortune from Magwitch, a fugitive he once provided food for, and puts the money toward his education so that he might gain Estrella’s favor. Does he win over the girl? I won’t spoil the ending.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: A slim novel that punches well above its weight, Great Expectations is a fable about the corrupting power of money, and the redeeming power of love, that has never lost its grip on the public imagination. It is also beautifully constructed. If some of Dickens’ novels sprawl luxuriously across the page, this one is as trim as a whippet. Touch any part of it and the whole structure quivers into life.

Bleak House (1852-53)

Dickens’ ninth novel, Bleak House , centers around Jarndyce and Jarndyce , a drawn-out case in England’s Court of Chancery involving one person who drew up several last wills with contradicting terms. The story follows the characters tied up in the case, many of whom are listed as beneficiaries.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: Each of Dickens’ major novels has its admirers, but few can match Bleak House for its range and verve. It is at once a remarkable verbal photograph of mid-Victorian life and a narrative experiment that anticipates much modern fiction. Some of its scenes, such as the death of Jo, the crossing sweeper, tread a fine line between pathos and melodrama, but they have a raw power that was never equaled even by Dickens himself.

The Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74), by John Forster

Soon after Dickens died from a stroke in 1870, John Forster, his friend and editor for more than 30 years, gathered letters, documents and memories and wrote his first biography.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: The result was patchy, pompous and sometimes reads more like a disguised autobiography. One reviewer sniffed that it “should not be called The Life of Dickens , but the History of Dickens’ Relations to Mr. Forster .” But it also contained some remarkable revelations, including the fragment of autobiography in which Dickens first told the truth about his miserable childhood. It is the foundation stone for all later biography.

Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906), by G. K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, an English writer in the early 20th century, devoted whole chapters of his study of Dickens to the novelist’s youth, his characters, his debut novel The Pickwick Papers , America and Christmas, among other topics.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: If Dickens invented the modern celebration of Christmas, Chesterton almost single-handedly invented the modern celebration of Dickens. What he relishes above all in Dickens’ writing is its joyful prodigality, and his own book comes close to matching Dickens in its energy and good humor. There have been many hundreds of books on Dickens written since Chesterton’s, but few are as lively or significant. Almost every sentence is a quotable gem.

The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination (1973, rev. ed. 2008), by John Carey

When the University of Oxford expanded its English curriculum to include literature written after the 1830s, professor and literary critic John Carey began to deliver lectures on Charles Dickens. These lectures eventually turned into a book, The Violent Effigy , which attempts to guide readers, unpretentiously, through Dickens’ fertile imagination.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: This brilliantly iconoclastic study starts from the premise that “we could scrap all the solemn parts of Dickens’ novels without impairing his status as a writer,” and sets out to celebrate the strange poetry of his imagination instead. Rather than a solemn treatise on Dickens’ symbolism, we are reminded of his obsession with masks and wooden legs; rather than viewing Dickens as a serious social critic, we are presented with a showman and comedian who “did not want to provoke … reform so much as to retain a large and lucrative audience.” It is the funniest book on Dickens ever written.

Dickens (1990), by Peter Ackroyd

This tome of 1,000-plus pages by Peter Ackroyd, a biographer who has also made Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot his subjects, captures the nonfiction—or life and times of Charles Dickens—that the writer often wove into his fiction.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: When Peter Ackroyd’s huge biography of Dickens was first published, it was attacked by some reviewers for what they saw as its self-indulgent postmodern tricks, including fictional dialogues in which Ackroyd conversed with his subject. Yet such passages are central to a book in which Ackroyd involves himself sympathetically in every aspect of Dickens’ life. As a result, you finish this book feeling not just that you know more about Dickens, but that you actually know him. A biography that rivals Dickens’ novels for its rich cast of characters, sprawling plot and unpredictable swerves between realism and romance.

Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (1999), by John Bowen

John Bowen, now a professor of 19th-century literature at England’s University of York, casts his eye toward Dickens’ early works, written from 1836 to 1844. He argues that novels such as The Pickwick Papers , Oliver Twist and Martin Chuzzlewit redefined fiction in the way that they broach politics and comedy.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: During Dickens’ lifetime they were by far his most popular works, and it was only in the 20th century that readers developed a preference for the later, darker novels. John Bowen’s study shows why we should return to them, and what they look like when viewed through modern critical eyes. It is a superbly readable and detailed piece of literary detective work.

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Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.

Charles Dickens’ Best Books 📚

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Throughout Dickens’ life, he wrote many well-loved novels. These include 'Great Expectations,' 'A Christmas Carol,' and 'Oliver Twist.'

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

On this list, readers can explore ten of the best books that Charles Dickens wrote throughout his life. Some were more critically successful than others, but all are read to this day. Most feature themes like poverty, class divide, the treatment of the poor, and satirize social norms.

Great Expectations

Great Expectations is Dickens’ thirteenth novel and one of his best-known. It is also his second to last completed novel. The book features the protagonist Pip, an orphan who grows up throughout the pages. It can be described as a bildungsroman or a coming-of-age novel. It was published as a serial starting in December of 1860 and ending in August of 1861.

The book is set in London and features characters like Magwitch, Estella, Joe the blacksmith, and Miss. Havisham.

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol is another well-loved novel by Charles Dickens. It features the hard-to-love protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge who starts the book as a miserable and miserly man of business. As the book progresses, he is haunted by three ghosts—the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. They show him who he was as a child, truths about his contemporary world, and what his future holds if he continues down the path he’s on. In the end, he determines to change his life and hold Christmas close to his heart for the rest of his days.

David Copperfield

David Copperfield is another example of a bildungsroman or coming of age novel. It features David Copperfield, who also narrates the novel. It details his life from the time he was born to his maturity. The book was published in 1849/1850 as a serial. In it, Dickens wove in some features from his own life. It was also his favorite book. It begins with a dark and troubling depiction of Victorian England and moves on to follow Copperfield as he grows up, moves through society, and studies. Its primary themes are those of growth and transformation.

Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist is Dickens’ second novel. It was published as a serial from 1837 to 1839 then as a three-part book in 1839. It follows Oliver Twist, who was born in a workhouse and later sold into an apprenticeship. He escapes from this life to travel throughout London. He meets Artful Dodger, a gang member, and pickpocket. The novel portrays the lives of criminals in Victorian London in a way that no other author ever had. It is also a social novel, one that draws the reader’s attention to issues of child labor and violence.

Bleak House

Bleak House is another long novel, published as a 20-part serial from 1852 to 1853. The novel is complex, featuring numerous characters, one of the central being Esther Summerson. The book is centered around a court case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in contention for years due to opposing wills.

The Pickwick Papers

The Pickwick Papers is a series of adventures written by Dickens in the mid-1830s. It was incredibly popular throughout Britain. It resulted in bootleg copies and even made its way into the theatre. The protagonist is Samuel Pickwick, a wealthy older man who founds the Pickwick Club. He and several other characters travel throughout London.

Hard Times

Hard Times is Dickens’ tenth novel. It is a social novel in that it features commentary and satire on contemporary English society. It is the shortest novel Dickens’ wrote and the only one that has no scenes set in London.

Throughout the novel’s history, its received mixed reviews from critics. This may be in part due to the fact that Dickens’ admitted to writing it as a way of boosting the sales of Household Words, his weekly periodical. Throughout, readers can explore Dickens’ depiction of the treatment of workers in Victorian England and the difference between social and economic classes.

Nicholas Nickleby

Nicholas Nickleby was Dickens’ third novel. It features Nicholas as the protagonist. The novel starts when the young man is forced to care for his mother and sister after his father dies. With little money, the family is forced to travel to London for assistance from their only living relative, Ralph Nickleby. He becomes the book’s antagonist, who often seems out to hurt and embarrass Nicholas.

Little Dorrit

Little Dorrit was published between 1855 and 1857. It tells the story of Amy Dorrit, who was born and raised in a debtor’s prison. Dickens uses the novel to satirize the social norms of the time and the institution of the debtor’s prison. In this setting, debtors, deemed criminals, were incarcerated until they could pay their debts. But, in prison, they were unable to work. The novel also focuses on themes like poverty and wealth.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is Dickens’ final novel. It is named after Edwin Drood, the nephew of the main character, John Jasper. The latter is an opium adductor and choirmaster who falls in love with one of his pupils, Rosa Bud (who is also Edwin’s fiancé). Edwin eventually disappears under mysterious circumstances. The book is set in the fictional town of Cloisterham (generally considered to be Rochester).

What is the best Dickens book to read?

Of all of Dickens’ well-loved novels, Great Expectations is generally cited as the most popular and commonly read. Also, well-loved is David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol.

Which Dickens novel should I start with?

David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol are generally considered to be the easiest of Dickens’ books to read. They might serve as a good place to start.

What was Charles Dickens’ nickname?

Dickens’ nickname was “Boz.” He used it as a pseudonym in his early works. It originated from a nickname he gave his younger brother.

What was Charles Dickens’ first book?

Dickens’ first book was The Pickwick Papers. It was published in 1836 and was an incredible success. It was the first novel to ever become widely popular throughout Victorian London. So much so, it spawned bootleg versions.

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The Mystery of Charles Dickens has been named the best biography of the year.

At this weekend’s annual conference of Biographers International Organization, A.N. Wilson’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens (HarperCollins) was awarded the BIO Plutarch Award—an award celebrating the best biography of the last year published in English, as chosen from nominations received by publishers and BIO members.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens was chosen from five other finalists: Les Payne and Tamara Payne’s The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X ; Jonathan Alter’s His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life ; Ted Widmer’s Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington ; and Martha Ackmann’s These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson . Said Kate Buford, chair of the Plutarch Committee, “During an unprecedented year marked by political upheavals, the COVID pandemic and many publishing challenges, we were struck by the compelling humanity and deft artistry of Wilson’s biography. It is a biographer’s biography.”

A Special Citation was given to Eddie S. Glaude Jr’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own , in recognition of “its summoning of Baldwin’s penetrating voice and eyes that remind us of the post-Civil War and post-civil rights betrayals of racial justice.”

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Charles Dickens summary

Discover the early life and literary career of charles dickens.

Charles Dickens , (born Feb. 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, Eng.—died June 9, 1870, Gad’s Hill, near Chatham, Kent), British novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. The defining moment of Dickens’s life occurred when he was 12 years old. With his father in debtors’ prison, he was withdrawn from school and forced to work in a factory. This deeply affected the sensitive boy. Though he returned to school at 13, his formal education ended at 15. As a young man, he worked as a reporter. His fiction career began with short pieces reprinted as Sketches by “Boz” (1836). He exhibited a great ability to spin a story in an entertaining manner and this quality, combined with the serialization of his comic novel The Pickwick Papers (1837), made him the most popular English author of his time. The serialization of such works as Oliver Twist (1838) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) followed. After a trip to America, he wrote A Christmas Carol (1843) in a few weeks. With Dombey and Son (1848), his novels began to express a heightened uneasiness about the evils of Victorian industrial society, which intensified in the semiautobiographical David Copperfield (1850), as well as in Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), Great Expectations (1861), and others. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) appeared in the period when he achieved great popularity for his public readings. Dickens’s works are characterized by an encyclopaedic knowledge of London, pathos, a vein of the macabre, a pervasive spirit of benevolence and geniality, inexhaustible powers of character creation, an acute ear for characteristic speech, and a highly individual and inventive prose style.

Learn more about Charles Dickens:

Dickens Fast Facts
Dickens Biography
Dickens' Novels
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Illustrating Dickens
Dickens' London
Mapping Dickens
Dickens & Christmas
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Dickens on Stage
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Discover Dickens' life and work depicted graphically .

Catherine Dickens

Catherine (Hogarth) Dickens (1815-1879) - Charles Dickens' wife, with whom he fathered 10 children. She was born in Scotland on May 19, 1815 and came to England with her family in 1834. Catherine was the daughter of George Hogarth , editor of the Evening Chronicle where Dickens was a young journalist. They were married on April 2, 1836 in St. Luke's Church, Chelsea and honeymooned in Chalk, near Chatham.

Charles was undoubtably in love at the outset but his feelings for Catherine wained as the family grew. With the birth of their last child in 1852 Dickens found Catherine an increasingly incompetent mother and housekeeper ( Johnson, 1952, p. 905-909 ) . Their separation, in 1858, was much publicized and rumors of Dickens unfaithfulness abounded, which he vehemently denied in public. Dickens and Catherine had little correspondence after the break, Catherine moving to a house in London with oldest son, Charley , and Dickens retreating to Gads Hill in Kent with Catherine's sister, Georgina , and all of the children except Charlie remaining with him. On her deathbed in 1879 she gave her collection of Dickens' letters to daughter Kate instructing her to " Give these to the British Museum, that the world may know he loved me once " ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 153-157 ) .

Katherine is buried at Highgate Cemetery , London.

Read a letter from Dickens to John Forster concerning separation from Catherine.

What Shall We Have for Dinner?

Around 1850 Catherine released a collection of recipes and bills of fare for dinners for from two to eighteen people. The book, published by Bradbury and Evans, was called What Shall We Have for Dinner? and was written under the pen name Lady Maria Clutterbuck. Charles Dickens wrote the introduction using Maria's voice ( Nayder, 2011, p. 186-189 ) . The book is referred to as the source of Christmas dinner in Thomas Keneally's novel The Dickens Boy .

Amazon.com: The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth by Lillian Nayder

The Life of Charles Dickens

An illustrated hypertext biography of charles dickens, childhood and education.

The Law and Early Jounalism
Early Novels
Middle Years
Later Years

At this point the family consisted of Charles, older sister Fanny , younger brothers Alfred and Frederick , and younger sister Letitia . Everyone except Charles and Fanny went to live in the Marshalsea with their parents. Fanny was boarding at the Royal Academy of Music, and Charles initially lodged with a landlady in Camden Town in north London. This proved to be too long a walk every day to the blacking factory and his family in the Marshalsea, so a room was found for him on Lant Street in Southwark near the prison.

Charles Dickens' friend and biographer John Forster

Young Charles, who dreamed of growing up a gentleman, found these dreams dashed working alongside common boys at the blacking factory and later wrote "It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age." Dickens shared this painful part of his childhood through the story of David Copperfield although no one realized it was autobiographical until related by biographer John Forster after Dickens' death ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 22-39 ) .

Mr Creakle from David Copperfield was based on William Jones

Charles was to further his education at Wellington House Academy , a school run by the harsh schoolmaster William Jones , a man who delighted in corporal punishment and who Dickens later described as " by far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know ". Charles would spend nearly three years, aged 12-15, at Wellington House, leaving in the spring of 1827 ( Slater, 2009, p. 25-27 ) . Many of his experiences at school, and the masters who taught there, would later find their way into his fiction.

The Law and Early Journalism

Charles had been fascinated with the theatre since childhood and often attended the theatre to break the monotony of reporting on parliamentary proceedings. He wrote to George Bartley, manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, in 1832 asking for an audition, which was granted. On the day of the audition Charles was ill with a bad cold and inflammation of the face and missed the appointment. He wrote to Bartley explaining the illness and that he would apply for another audition next season. He would later marvel at how near he came to a very different sort of life ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 139-140 ) .

Catherine Dickens (nee Hogarth) by Frank Stone

Dickens, writing feverishly, as well as holding down the job of a reporter, now found himself in the throes of romance. He became a regular visitor to the Hogarth household and soon proposed marriage, which Catherine quickly accepted ( Slater, 2009, p. 47 ) . They were married at St. Luke's church, Chelsea on April 2, 1836. Two months previous his collection of short stories was published in book form by John Macrone entitled Sketches by Boz with illustrations by popular artist George Cruikshank ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 174 ) . Dickens' pseudonym Boz came from his younger brother Augustus's through-the-nose pronunciation of his own nickname, Moses.

The Early Novels

Upon returning home he penned the promised travel book, American Notes , a rather unflattering description of America, and followed that with Martin Chuzzlewit , published in monthly parts, in which the protagonist goes to America and is subjected to the same sort of puffed up, mercenary people Dickens found there. The story was not well received and did not sell well ( Patten, 1978, p. 133 ) . Neither had Barnaby Rudge ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 33 ) , and Dickens felt that perhaps his lamp had gone out.

Dickens found himself in dire financial straits. He had borrowed heavily from his publishers for the American trip and his family continued to grow with their fifth child, son Francis , on the way. His feckless father was borrowing money in Charles' name behind his back. He needed an idea for a new book that would satisfy his pecuniary problems ( Slater, 2009, p. 215-220 ) .

The seeds for the story that became A Christmas Carol were planted in Dickens' mind during a trip to Manchester to deliver a speech in support of education. Thoughts of education as a remedy for crime and poverty, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School , caused Dickens to resolve to " strike a sledge hammer blow " for the poor ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 408-409 ) . As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He wrote that as the tale unfolded he " wept and laughed, and wept again' and that he 'walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed " ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 326 ) . Dickens was at odds with Chapman and Hall over the low receipts from Martin Chuzzlewit and decided to self-publish the book, overspending on color illustrations and lavish binding and then setting the cost low so that everyone could afford it ( Slater, 2009, p. 220 ) . The book was an instant success but royalties were low after production costs were paid .

Serialization of Martin Chuzzlewit came to a conclusion in July, 1844, and Dickens conceived of the idea of another travel book; this time he would go to Italy ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 426 ) . The family spent a year in Italy, first in Genoa, and then traveling through the southern part of the country. He wrote the second of his Christmas Books, The Chimes ( Slater, 2009, p. 230-231 ) , while in Genoa and sent his adventures home in the form of letters which were published in the Daily News . These were collected into a single volume entitled Pictures from Italy in May, 1846 ( Davis, 1999, p. 318 ) .

Dickens as Captain Bobadil in Every Man in His Humour

During the 1840s Dickens, with a troupe of friends and family in tow, began acting in amateur theatricals in London and across Britain. Charles worked tirelessly as actor and stage manager and often adjusted scenes, assisted carpenters, invented costumes, devised playbills, and generally oversaw the entire production of the performances ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 436 ) . The Dickens' amateur troupe even performed twice for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert ( Davis, 1999, p. 4 ) .

The Middle Years

In 1839 the Dickens family moved from Doughty Street to a larger home at Devonshire Terrace near Regent's Park . The family continued to grow with the addition of sons Alfred (1845), Sydney (1847), and Henry (1849).

Dickens continued to write a book for the Christmas season every year. After A Christmas Carol (1843), and The Chimes (1844), he followed with The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848). All of these sold well at the time of publication but none endured as A Christmas Carol has ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 97 ) .

Dickens had begun writing an autobiography in the late 1840s that he shared with his friend and future biographer, John Forster ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 22 ) . He found the writing too painful and opted instead to work his story into the fictional account of David Copperfield , which he later described as his personal favorite among his novels ( David Copperfield , p. xii ) . The story was serialized from May 1849 until November 1850. During the writing of Copperfield the tireless Dickens began another venture, a weekly magazine called Household Words . Charles worked as editor as well as contributor with additional pieces supplied by other writers. Also during the writing of Copperfield Catherine gave birth to a daughter, named for David Copperfield's wife Dora ( Slater, 2009, p. 312 ) . Dora , sickly from birth, died at 8 months old ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 627-628 ) .

Dickens followed David Copperfield with what many consider one of his finest novels, Bleak House ( Davis, 1999, p. 35 ) . Dickens used his previous experience as a court reporter to tell the story of a prolonged case in the Courts of Chancery. During the writing of Bleak House Catherine gave birth to a son, Edward (1852), nicknamed Plorn. Edward would be last of Charles and Catherine's children and the family moved again, this time to Tavistock House . Following Bleak House Dickens serialized his next book, Hard Times , in his weekly magazine, Household Words . Following Hard Times Dickens returned to the painful childhood memory of his father's imprisonment for debt with the story of Little Dorrit . Amy Dorrit's father, William , was a prisoner in the Marshalsea debtor's prison and Amy was born there.

During the 1850s Charles and Catherine's marriage started to show signs of trouble. Dickens grew increasingly dissatisfied with Catherine whom, after giving birth to ten children, had grown quite stout and lethargic. She was increasingly unable to keep up with her energetic husband ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 155 ) . The problem came to a head when Dickens became enthralled with a young actress he met during one of his amateur theatricals, Ellen Ternan . Charles and Catherine were separated in 1858 and caused a public stir mostly contributed to by Dickens' desire to exonerate himself ( Johnson, 1952, p. 922-925 ) . All of the Dickens children, with exception of Charley , would live with their father, as would Catherine's sister, Georgina . The relationship with Ternan, the depth of which is still being debated ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 914-918 ) , would continue the rest of Dickens' life.

Dickens with daughters Mamie and Kate at Gads Hill Place

Dickens and his children now moved into the mansion Gads Hill Place in Kent that he had purchased in 1856 near his childhood home of Chatham. As a boy, Dickens would walk by the impressive house, built in 1780, with his father who told him that with hard work he could someday live in such a splendid mansion ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 6 ) . In 1864 Dickens received, from actor friend Charles Fechter, a two-story Swiss chalet that Dickens had installed across the road from Gads Hill with a tunnel under the road for access ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 955-956 ) . Dickens wrote his his final works in his study on the top floor of the chalet.

Dickens' All the Year Round office and private apartment in Covent Garden

The separation with Catherine also caused a rift between Dickens and his publishers, Bradbury and Evans . Bradbury and Evans also published the popular magazine Punch . When they refused to publish Dickens' personal statement , his explanation for the recent separation, Charles was furious and refused to have further dealings with them. He ceased publication of his weekly magazine, Household Words , continuing it under a new name, All the Year Round , and with his old publishers, Chapman and Hall ( Kaplan, 1988, p. 395-401 ) .

In the 1850s Dickens began reading excerpts of his books in public, first for charity, and, beginning in 1858, for profit. These readings proved extremely popular with the public and Dickens continued them for the rest of his life. The readings included excerpts from his Christmas books , David Copperfield , and Nicholas Nickleby , with A Christmas Carol , for which he wrote a condensed verion , and The Trial from Pickwick being the most popular ( Davis, 1999, p. 328 ) . He later included the dramatic murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist , the performance of which took a toll on Dickens' fragile health ( Johnson, 1952, p. 1144 ) .

The Later Years

In May, 1864, Dickens began publication of what would be his last completed novel. Published in monthly installments, Our Mutual Friend touches the familiar theme of the evils and corruption that the love of money brings. Poor health causing perhaps a stutter in his usual creative genius, Dickens found beginning the novel difficult, he wrote to Forster "Although I have not been wanting in industry, I have been wanting in invention" ( Letters, 1998, v. 10, p. 414 ) . After finally finding his footing, the monthly installments did not sell well despite a massive advertising blitz ( Patten, 1978, p. 307-308 ) .

On the 9th of June, 1865, traveling back from France with Ellen Ternan and her mother, and with the latest installment of Our Mutual Friend , the train in which they were traveling was involved in an accident in Staplehurst, Kent. Many were killed but Dickens and his companions escaped serious injury although Dickens was severely shaken. Three years later he wrote that he still experienced " vague rushes of terror even riding in hansom cabs " ( Johnson, 1952, p. 1018-1021 ) .

In the late 1850s Dickens began to contemplate a second visit to America , tempted by the money he could make by extending his public readings there. Despite pleas not to go from friends and family because of increasingly ill health ( Johnson, 1952, p. 1070 ) , he finally decided to go and arrived in Boston on November 19, 1867. The original plan called for a visit to Chicago and as far west as St. Louis. Because of ill health and bad weather this idea was scrapped and Dickens did not venture from the northeastern states ( Slater, 2009, p. 580 ) . He stayed for 5 months and gave 76 extremely popular performances for which he earned, after expenses, an incredible £19,000 ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 17 ) .

Dickens returned home in May, 1868, somewhat revitalized during the sea voyage, to a full load of work. He immediately plunged back into editing All the Year Round and, in October, began a farewell reading tour of Britain that included a new, very passionate, and physically taxing, performance of the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist ( Davis, 1999, p. 353 ) .

Charles Dickens' grave at Westminster Abbey

Monthly publication of what was to be his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood , began in April, 1870. On the evening of June 8, 1870, Dickens, after working on the latest installment of Drood that morning in the chalet at Gads Hill , suffered a stroke and died the next day ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 1076-1079 ) . The Mystery of Edwin Drood was exactly half finished and the mystery is unsolved to this day .

Dickens had wished to be buried, without fanfare, in a small cemetery in Rochester, but the Nation would not allow it. He was laid to rest in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, the flowers from thousands of mourners overflowing the open grave ( Forster, 1899, v. 2, p. 513 ) .

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6 Must-Read Charles Dickens Books: Where To Start

Wondering where to start reading Charles Dickens’ books? This beginner’s guide will help you find the best books to get started with Dickens!

The 6 Must-Read Books by Charles Dickens: Where to Start Reading

Charles Dickens is a prominent Victorian-era figure and one of the most celebrated authors of all time. He has crafted stories that have stood the test of time, captivating readers for generations with their insightful social commentary and vivid characters. When I think back to my first interaction with Dickens, hands-down “ A Christmas Carol ” comes to mind. This classic tale of redemption and the power of kindness has been adapted countless times, reminding us of the impact Dickens’ writing continues to have on our society.

As I got older and read more of his works, I discovered that Dickens was not just a master storyteller but also a passionate advocate for social reform. His novels shed light on the harsh realities faced by the working class during the Industrial Revolution, bringing attention to issues such as poverty, child labor, and education inequality. His writing sparked important conversations and inspired change in Victorian society.

However, what truly sets Dickens apart is his ability to create characters that feel like real people. From the optimistic orphan Oliver Twist to the bitter yet sympathetic Miss Havisham, his characters are multidimensional and relatable. Through their eyes, we see the best and worst of humanity, making us reflect on our own actions and values.

So whether you are a novice reader or an ardent literature enthusiast, knowing where to begin with Dickens’ extensive works can be daunting. But if you’re interested in reading his work but don’t know where to start, don’t worry! This guide will help you select Charles Dickens’ best books and start your literary journey.

Who is Charles Dickens?

Charles Dickens was a Victorian-era novelist born in England in 1812. He wrote over 15 novels, as well as many short stories and other works. Charles Dickens is best known for his vivid characters and storylines that still captivate readers today.

I’ve also written an article that shares more about Charles Dickens and his family, including his wife and children, along with more of his books.

What was Charles Dickens first successful book?

Charles Dickens’ first successful book was “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,” also known as “The Pickwick Papers,” published in 1836. Originally issued in monthly installments, this novel was a huge success and marked the beginning of Dickens’ illustrious literary career.

What is Charles Dickens most famous book?

Charles Dickens’ most famous book is arguably “A Tale of Two Cities.” Published in 1859, this historical novel set against the backdrop of the French Revolution has sold over 200 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books ever. The opening lines, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” have become iconic, further cementing its status in literary history.

What is the most read Charles Dickens book?

The most-read book by Charles Dickens is “ A Christmas Carol .” This novella, published in 1843, has become a classic holiday tale familiar to many, even those who have not delved deeply into Dickens’ broader work. The story of Ebenezer Scrooge and his transformation from an embittered miser to a man who understands the true spirit of Christmas continues to touch hearts, making “A Christmas Carol” a perennial favorite across generations.

What is considered Dickens best book?

While it’s subjective and opinions vary, many literary scholars and avid readers consider “Great Expectations” to be Dickens’ best book. Published in 1861, this coming-of-age novel weaves the tale of an orphan named Pip and his growth and personal development against a backdrop of social critique. The novel’s richly drawn characters, intricate plot, and exploration of themes like wealth, poverty, love, and rejection have earned it an enduring place in the pantheon of great literature. It’s an excellent starting point for anyone new to Charles Dickens’ work.

Which Dickens novel should beginners read first?

For beginners embarking on their Charles Dickens reading journey, “Oliver Twist” is often recommended as the first book to read and I personally agree as well. Published in 1838, this novel offers a powerful portrayal of childhood innocence in the face of societal corruption and abuse. The story of Oliver Twist, a poor orphan navigating the brutal realities of the London underbelly, is both gripping and accessible. With its relatively shorter length compared to other Dickens novels, and its engaging narrative and memorable characters like the Artful Dodger and Fagin, it serves as a fitting introduction to Dickens’ style and themes.

6 Must-Read Charles Dickens Books

For readers looking to explore books by Charles Dickens, here is a list of six must-read books:

A Tale of Two Cities
Oliver Twist
A Christmas Carol
Great Expectations
David Copperfield
The Pickwick Papers

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

One of Charles Dickens’s most famous novels is “Oliver Twist.” The story follows Oliver, a young orphan navigating life in London and forced to work in miserable conditions. Yet, despite the hardships he faces, Oliver remains optimistic. Ultimately “Oliver Twist” is a dark and gritty novel that provides a glimpse into the lives of the poor and downtrodden in Victorian England. This novel is an excellent choice for readers who want to experience Dickens’ writing style and get a taste of his social commentary.

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A Christmas Carol - book - by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Another wildly popular book by Dickens is “A Christmas Carol.” In this novel, the reader is introduced to the character of Ebenezer Scrooge, a wealthy but miserly man who hates Christmas. Three ghosts visit Scrooge on Christmas Eve and show him the error of his ways. This novel is a heartwarming story that has been adapted into many different forms over the years, but there’s nothing quite like reading the original. If you’re looking for a heartwarming read this winter, “A Christmas Carol” is a perfect choice.

Buy from Amazon or Bookshop

P.S. Check out my article on the timeless lessons in A Christmas Carol. If you’re looking for more classic or short Christmas stories to read, that will leave you feeling festive.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

“Great Expectations” is one of Charles Dickens’s most well-known novels. The story follows Pip, a young boy from a humble background who suddenly finds himself with a large fortune. Pip leaves his home and family behind with his new wealth to pursue a luxury life in London. However, he soon discovers that money cannot buy happiness. “Great Expectations” is an excellent choice for readers looking for an engaging and thought-provoking coming-of-age story that explores class and social mobility themes.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

If you’re looking for a more personal story, “David Copperfield” is a great choice. The novel is based on Dickens’ own life experiences, and it’s his most autobiographical work. The story follows David Copperfield from his childhood through to adulthood and chronicles the many ups and downs he faces along the way. This novel is a powerful, moving story that will resonate with many readers.

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

If you’re interested in Dickens’ more comedic work, “The Pickwick Papers” is a great option. First published as a serial in monthly installments, the novel follows the members of the Pickwick Club, who travel around England observing and reporting on the people they meet. Along the way, they get into all sorts of mishaps and hijinks. The novel is packed with humor and satire, and it’s an excellent choice for readers who want to laugh out loud while they’re reading.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Last but not least, “A Tale of Two Cities” is one of Charles Dickens’s most famous novels, and it’s the book known for the iconic first line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The book tells the story of two cities, London and Paris, during the time of the French Revolution. The book follows a cast of characters from both cities and explores the themes of love, loss, and sacrifice. “A Tale of Two Cities” is a gripping and suspenseful read that will keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish. If you’re looking for a suspenseful historical novel, “A Tale of Two Cities” is a perfect choice.

What are 3 of Charles Dickens most famous works?

Three of Charles Dickens’ famous books include:

A Tale of Two Cities: Set in London and Paris, this novel explores life before and during the French Revolution. It remains renowned for its opening line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Great Expectations: This coming-of-age novel tells the story of an orphan named Pip and remains a staple in literature due to its exploration of themes like wealth, love, and rejection.
Oliver Twist: As one of his most famous works, “Oliver Twist” offers a grim portrayal of orphanages and the underworld of London, illuminating Dickens’ critique of social stratification and poverty.

What is the most famous piece of literature that Charles Dickens ever wrote?

Arguably, the most famous piece of literature that Charles Dickens ever wrote is “A Christmas Carol.” This novella, which tells the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge’s transformation from a miser to a kind-hearted man after visits from the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come, is synonymous with the holiday season and has been adapted countless times for stage, screen, and radio. Its message about the spirit of giving and the importance of kindness resonates with people worldwide, making it enduringly popular.

What is Charles Dickens least popular book?

While it’s challenging to pinpoint Charles Dickens’ least popular book due to the universal acclaim of his works, “Barnaby Rudge” is often cited as being less well-known among his oeuvre. The novel, one of Dickens’ earlier works, is a historical narrative set against the backdrop of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780. Despite its lesser-known status, “Barnaby Rudge” still showcases Dickens’ masterful storytelling and keen social commentary, making it worth a read for any Dickens aficionado.

Why is Charles Dickens so famous today?

Charles Dickens’ work is still widely read and appreciated today due to the timeless themes he explores. Charles Dickens’ novels remain popular because they offer insight into human nature while providing an entertaining experience for readers. His works are full of unforgettable characters that stay with readers long after they’ve finished reading the book. Charles Dickens’ work has also been adapted into films, television shows, plays, and musicals.

By reading Charles Dickens’ works, readers can gain insight into his time’s social and political issues. No matter which Charles Dickens book you choose to read first, you are sure to enjoy the timeless stories he wrote. So if you’re looking for a great place to start your Charles Dickens journey, look no further! These six books will give you an introduction to Charles Dickens.

What do you think about the Charles Dickens books on this list?

Have you read any of Charles Dickens books? Are any of these books or his other works on your TBR? What do you think are Charles Dickens best books? What do you consider to be Charles Dickens famous books? What is your favorite book by Dickens? What books would you add to this list? Let us talk all about Charles Dickens in the comments below.

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Charles Dickens' 10 best novels ranked: The Christmas Carol author's greatest works from Bleak House to Oliver Twist

Victorian novelist offers wealth of unforgettable characters and some of the most pointed satire on british society and manners ever committed to paper, article bookmarked.

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Few writers are as closely associated with the festive season as Charles Dickens .

His novella A Christmas Carol , which first went on sale on 19 December 1843, remains Britain’s favourite secular Christmas story, dusted down and revisited every year without fail.

Stephen Tompkinson playing miserly moneylender Ebeneezer Scrooge at The Old Vic this year is only the latest interpretation of a character who has provided the basis for every contrite naysayer since, from George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) to Dr Seuss’s Grinch. Alastair Sim’s wonderful portrayal of 1951 remains the Scrooge to beat.

Dickens was motivated to write his ghost story by a deeply felt outrage at the hardships of the urban poor he saw every day on the streets of Victorian London and the unfeeling avarice of the arch-capitalists of his age.

The author had known poverty himself as a child after his father John was incarcerated in the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark for debt, forcing the young Charles into hard labour at a boot-blacking workhouse.

In the winter of 1843, Dickens had visited Clerkenwell’s Field Lane Ragged School, a recently founded charitable institute for urchins. The deprivations of the pupils he encountered there only stirred his indignation.

Resolved to address his concerns in fiction, Dickens returned to an idea he had first touched upon in The Pickwick Papers (1836): the sinner reformed by supernatural intervention. In that novel, Mr Wardle tells the story of Gabriel Grub, a church sexton visited by goblins, who show him his past and future and inspire a more charitable attitude.

Gabriel and the Goblin from The Pickwick Papers

The Berkshire MP John Elwes and Jemmy Wood, owner of the Gloucester Old Bank – two men known as notorious spendthrifts – have both been citied as possible inspirations for Scrooge, whose name was taken by Dickens from a gravestone spotted in Edinburgh and whose philosophy serves as a satire on flint-hearted Malthusian economics.

The tale of Scrooge’s conversion from penny-pinching humbug to zealous altruist provided a cheering moral, but also set in stone our popular conception of the Victorian Christmas, a time of candlelight and plum pudding, undoubtedly two central reasons for its enduring popularity.

But Charles Dickens is not just for Christmas. While many will know A Christmas Carol intimately, the sheer length of many of his other works too often proves a deterrent.

Many readers will plump for The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) or Hard Times (1854) for their comparative brevity but, in truth, neither represents Dickens at his best. As Oscar Wilde so savagely observed: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”

Here’s our selection of Dickens's 10 finest novels, any one of which would provide ideal reading in the long dark nights to come.

10. A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Dickens’s foray into the French Revolution , inspired by a reading of Thomas Carlyle’s history of the Terror, is atypical of his output and certainly imperfect but a rollicking ride nonetheless.

The tale of Dr Alexandre Manette, freed from the Bastille after 18 years and newly arrived in England, where he is reunited with his daughter, Lucie. She marries the exiled French aristocrat Charles Darnay, who is drawn back to his homeland as the Reign of Terror erupts, the revolutionaries driven on by shopkeeper Ernest Defarge and his fearsome, vengeful wife Therese.

Only Sydney Carton, an alcoholic English lawyer also in love with Lucie, can help Darnay, a man he closely resembles.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Dickens begins, offering one of the most famous opening lines in literary history.

Incredibly, he manages to surpass it at the close, with Carton’s desperately moving words as he awaits the guillotine: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.”

9. Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)

The author’s earliest novels followed the picaresque format of his 18th-century forebears, notably Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, with Chuzzlewit recounting its title character’s being disinherited by his wealthy grandfather and forced to work as an apprentice for the comically self-serving architect Seth Pecksniff, a villain keen to wangle the Chuzzlewits out of their fortune.

Chuzzlewit is best known for its second act, in which Martin sets out for America only to find the New World populated by fraudsters and the town of “Eden” to be a malaria-ridden swamp in dire need of draining.

A ripe piece of satire drawn from the author’s own experiences of the United States, which he had visited on a reading tour in 1842, Chuzzlewit leaves one chomping at the bit to imagine what the writer might have made of Donald Trump .

Pecksniff is a joy but, among the supporting cast, the gin-totting midwife Sarah Gamp is not to be missed, a particularly magnificent feat of comic characterisation.

8. Barnaby Rudge (1841)

Like A Tale of Two Cities, Barnaby Rudge is a historical novel set half a century earlier, this time dealing with the Gordon Riots of 1780, a populist anti-Catholic uprising inspired by Lord George Gordon’s inflammatory rhetoric against the Popist “infiltration” of Britain. Their cause has uncomfortable echoes of the far-right Islamophobia of today.

Dickens uses the appalling conduct of the rioters as a means of attacking mob violence and, particularly, the hijacking of political causes for crude personal gain. The hangman Ned Dennis, who loves his work, is a deeply chilling figure.

7. Nicholas Nickleby (1839)

Nickleby contains some of Dickens’ very best character work. The vile Wackford Squeers, proprietor of Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire, is a more pantomime assault on wayward educators than Gradgrind in Hard Times but all the funnier for that. The everyday evil of Ralph Nickleby though (another miser) is no laughing matter.

Cedric Hardwicke as Ralph Nickleby in Ealing’s 1947 film of the novel

His fall at the hands of Newman Noggs, a man he has effectively enslaved by obligation, can only be read with a rousing cheer in a book that contains nothing close to a dull moment.

Nicholas’s spell as a repertory actor with Vincent Crummles’ theatre troupe and the tragic fate of Smike are equally stellar.

6. The Pickwick Papers (1837)

Commenced as a serial when the writer was just 24 and employed as a parliamentary correspondent, Dickens’s first novel strongly reveals his early debt to Fielding and Smollett and is also perhaps his most consistently funny book.

The tale of clubman Samuel Pickwick, who sets out like Don Quixote in pursuit of adventure in the naive company of messrs Winkle, Snodgrass and Tupman, planning to report back on their exploits to an enraptured audience of fellow Pickwickians.

Pickwick’s arrest and imprisonment in the Fleet for “breach of promise” after a misunderstanding with his landlady is hilarious, as is the clipped bluster of Alfred Jingle, the snoring of Joe and the wit and wisdom of Sam Weller, one of the great English everymen.

Conviviality at Bob Sawyer’s in The Pickwick Papers

The Papers also marked the commencement of Dickens’ fruitful partnership with Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”), who took over as illustrator after the suicide of Robert Seymour. Only George Cruikshank would match Phiz in lifting the author’s unique creations off the page.

5. Little Dorrit (1857)

Lawyer Arthur Clennam, returned to London from China, befriends angelic seamstress Amy Dorrit and is shocked to find her supporting her father William Dorrit, imprisoned in the Marshalsea for debt (as Dickens’ own parent had been) for more than 20 years. Known as “the Father of the Marshalsea”, Dorrit is respected by his fellow inmates and too vain to acknowledge his daughter’s efforts on behalf of the family.

Arthur sets out to help, pulling on the thread and unravelling Dorrit’s financial affairs to the betterment of all, only for Clennam himself to be hit by calamity and end up taking his place.

Fresh from lambasting the judicial system in Bleak House , Dickens here went after the machinery of government through his portrayal of the “Circumlocution Office”, staffed entirely by a dynasty of Barnacles positively thriving on the business of chaos.

As in A Christmas Carol , poverty and the social structures in place to keep the downtrodden low are again his true target.

4. Oliver Twist (1839)

Perhaps the best known of the author’s stories outside of A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist casts its orphan hero among the thieves of London: Bill Sikes, Fagin and the Artful Dodger.

Dickens used his own unhappy adolescence in the workhouse to sketch in Oliver’s childhood under Mr Bumble and his experience as a journalist to report the plight of street children, forced into pickpocketing and worse by desperate necessity.

Oliver asks for more gruel to the horror of his peers. Illustration by George Cruikshank

Sikes’s murder of Nancy is one of the most terrifying passages in literature and elevates the whole undertaking.

3. Bleak House (1853)

Dickens had begun his attack on the in-built absurdities of the bureaucratic behemoth that is the British legal system with Dodson and Fogg in Pickwick and revisited his contention that “the law is an ass” here to extraordinary effect.

The seemingly never-ending case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce at its centre rumbles on indefinitely, gradually chewing up the disputed inheritance in question until no one can remember its origins and there are no spoils left for the victor in any event: “Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.”

Lady Dedlock and Jo. Illustration by Harry Furniss from 1910

The kindly Chancery lawyer John Jarndyce meanwhile finds himself legal guardian to Esther Summerson – unknowingly the daughter of Lady Dedlock, whose past drives the mystery - and to Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, the wards of court who fall in love and hope the case will be resolved in their favour.

Harold Skimpole – a sponging associate of Jarndyce who disingenuously insists on his state of childlike innocence to wheedle his way out of adult responsibility – and the ludicrous dancing master Turveydrop appear among another unforgettable supporting cast.

2. David Copperfield (1850)

This masterly bildungsroman charts the life and adventures of the eponymous hero, dispatched to live in an upturned boat on Yarmouth beach after his unworldly mother marries the cruel Edward Murdstone.

After boarding school and an unhappy stint in London, David is befriended in Dover by his monomaniacal aunt Betsy Trotwood before encountering the tippling lawyer Mr Wickfield and his “dreadful ‘umble” assistant Uriah Heep, the latter slyly seeking to usurp the former.

Betrayed by his schoolmate Steerforth, David rises to prominence as a novelist, has his heart broken by tragedy and ultimately finds lasting happiness.

Once more drawing on aspects of his own past, Dickens is on supreme form here. In the person of Wilkins Micawber, he offers another quietly devastating portrait of his own hapless father, perennially in debt and unfailingly optimistic of a brighter tomorrow. WC Fields’s portrayal in the 1935 MGM film is unmatched.

Armando Iannucci is nevertheless currently working on a new adaptation of Copperfield starring Dev Patel.

1. Great Expectations (1861)

Dickens achieved perfection with this gothic masterpiece about the ascent of a blacksmith’s apprentice from the Kent Marshes to the status of affluent London gentleman after he is bequeathed a fortune by a mysterious benefactor.

Pip erroneously assumes his patron to be Miss Haversham, an eccentric brewery heiress who has vowed revenge against all mankind after being jilted on her wedding day, but the truth is far more shocking.

Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham in the 1946 film version of Great Expectations

Abel Magwitch, Pumblechook, Estella, Herbert Pocket, Jaggers the lawyer, Wemmick and the Aged P, Bentley Drummle and the heartbreaking Joe Gargery – all life is here.

Haversham, sat alone in her mansion wearing white, a three-tiered cake mouldering at her side, utterly consumed by hatred, would be worth the price of admission alone.

You can’t do better than David Lean’s version of 1946 with John Mills, Martita Hunt, Jean Simmons and Alec Guinness.

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A black-and-white photo of Charles Dickens, sitting backward on an upholstered chair and resting his head on his right hand. He has a long, scraggly beard and wears a trimmed jacket and bow tie.

Charles Dickens: the Man, the Myth, the Brand

In “The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens,” Helena Kelly revisits the image the author crafted so carefully in his lifetime.

Credit... Rischgitz/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

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By Alexis Coe

Alexis Coe is a historian and the author, most recently, of “You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.”

Nov. 16, 2023
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THE LIFE AND LIES OF CHARLES DICKENS , by Helena Kelly

The specter of biography has long struck fear in the hearts of living legends. Martha Washington, Henry James and Somerset Maugham tried to thwart would-be chroniclers by pitching private papers into the fire — heartbreaking acts of futile resistance. Trusted correspondents did not, as James instructed, “burn, burn, burn.”

Charles Dickens, however, had a much happier outcome in his friend John Forster’s three-volume biography, published between 1871 and 1874. The trouble, according to Helena Kelly’s new book, “The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens,” is “simply that Forster wasn’t a very good biographer.”

For decades Forster, a writer and critic of comparatively modest success, was kind of like Dickens’s literary companion. He listened to Dickens’s troubles, read his rough drafts and negotiated much of his life, including a marital separation from Catherine Hogarth, the mother of his 10 children, whom he left for Ellen “Nelly” Ternan, an actress 27 years his junior. It was the first time Dickens — who was “astonishingly, globally famous,” Kelly writes, “a product, a brand” — suffered in the public eye.

And before he died, in 1870, Dickens entrusted Forster with his manuscripts. Ever the “faithful assistant,” Forster copied down “the story Dickens gave him,” and published the first volume of “The Life of Charles Dickens” 18 months after his subject’s death, which is the best time to make hay.

A century and a half later, archives are far more accessible than they used to be, and Kelly is ready to try “Dickens the conjurer” for a book that amounts to “posthumous brand management.” Among a laundry list of perjury charges is Forster’s biggest revelation: that the novel “David Copperfield” was semi-autobiographical, inspired by Dickens’s childhood labor in a boot-polish factory during his father John’s (first) stint in debtors’ prison. Dickens, who wrote his own press releases, had managed to suppress the most basic facts about his background; now readers had Forster to “confirm” what they’d suspected all along.

“The picture of the young Charles as an inexplicably neglected child laboring forlornly in a warehouse by the river while his father languishes in the Marshalsea prison is terribly affecting,” Kelly writes, “but can we be sure that it’s accurate?” This is not a new question — nor is it one the author ultimately answers. In an 1872 issue of The North American Review, a critic called the fib “a good example of this peculiarity of Dickens’s character, and of Mr. Forster’s apparent inability to detect it.”

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Biography of Charles Dickens, English Novelist

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Charles Dickens (February 7, 1812–June 9, 1870) was a popular English novelist of the Victorian era, and to this day he remains a giant in British literature. Dickens wrote numerous books that are now considered classics, including "David Copperfield," "Oliver Twist," "A Tale of Two Cities," and "Great Expectations." Much of his work was inspired by the difficulties he faced in childhood as well as social and economic problems in Victorian Britain.

Fast Facts: Charles Dickens

Known For : Dickens was the popular author of "Oliver Twist," "A Christmas Carol," and other classics.
Born : February 7, 1812 in Portsea, England
Parents : Elizabeth and John Dickens
Died : June 9, 1870 in Higham, England
Published Works : Oliver Twist (1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1861)
Spouse : Catherine Hogarth (m. 1836–1870)
Children : 10

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsea, England. His father had a job working as a pay clerk for the British Navy, and the Dickens family, by the standards of the day, should have enjoyed a comfortable life. But his father's spending habits got them into constant financial difficulties. When Charles was 12, his father was sent to debtors' prison, and Charles was forced to take a job in a factory that made shoe polish known as blacking.

Life in the blacking factory for the bright 12-year-old was an ordeal. He felt humiliated and ashamed, and the year or so he spent sticking labels on jars would be a profound influence on his life. When his father managed to get out of debtors' prison, Charles was able to resume his sporadic schooling. However, he was forced to take a job as an office boy at the age of 15.

By his late teens, he had learned stenography and landed a job as a reporter in the London courts. By the early 1830s , he was reporting for two London newspapers.

Early Career

Dickens aspired to break away from newspapers and become an independent writer, and he began writing sketches of life in London. In 1833 he began submitting them to a magazine, The Monthly . He would later recall how he submitted his first manuscript, which he said was "dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street."

When the sketch he'd written, titled "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," appeared in print, Dickens was overjoyed. The sketch appeared with no byline, but soon he began publishing items under the pen name "Boz."

The witty and insightful articles Dickens wrote became popular, and he was eventually given the chance to collect them in a book. "Sketches by Boz" first appeared in early 1836, when Dickens had just turned 24. Buoyed by the success of his first book, he married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a newspaper editor. He settled into a new life as a family man and an author.

Rise to Fame

"Sketches by Boz" was so popular that the publisher commissioned a sequel, which appeared in 1837. Dickens was also approached to write the text to accompany a set of illustrations, and that project turned into his first novel, "The Pickwick Papers," which was published in installments from 1836 to 1837. This book was followed by "Oliver Twist," which appeared in 1839.

Dickens became amazingly productive. "Nicholas Nickleby" was written in 1839, and "The Old Curiosity Shop" in 1841. In addition to these novels, Dickens was turning out a steady stream of articles for magazines. His work was incredibly popular. Dickens was able to create remarkable characters, and his writing often combined comic touches with tragic elements. His empathy for working people and for those caught in unfortunate circumstances made readers feel a bond with him.

As his novels appeared in serial form, the reading public was often gripped with anticipation. The popularity of Dickens spread to America, and there were stories told about how Americans would greet British ships at the docks in New York to find out what had happened next in Dickens' latest novel.

Visit to America

Capitalizing on his international fame, Dickens visited the United States in 1842 when he was 30 years old. The American public was eager to greet him, and he was treated to banquets and celebrations during his travels.

In New England, Dickens visited the factories of Lowell, Massachusetts, and in New York City he was taken to the see the Five Points , the notorious and dangerous slum on the Lower East Side. There was talk of him visiting the South, but as he was horrified by the idea of enslavement he never went south of Virginia.

Upon returning to England, Dickens wrote an account of his American travels which offended many Americans.

'A Christmas Carol'

In 1842, Dickens wrote another novel, "Barnaby Rudge." The following year, while writing the novel "Martin Chuzzlewit," Dickens visited the industrial city of Manchester, England. He addressed a gathering of workers, and later he took a long walk and began to think about writing a Christmas book that would be a protest against the profound economic inequality he saw in Victorian England. Dickens published " A Christmas Carol " in December 1843, and it became one of his most enduring works.

Dickens traveled around Europe during the mid-1840s. After returning to England, he published five new novels: "Dombey and Son," "David Copperfield," "Bleak House," "Hard Times," and "Little Dorrit."

By the late 1850s , Dickens was spending more time giving public readings. His income was enormous, but so were his expenses, and he often feared he would be plunged back into the sort of poverty he had known as a child.

Charles Dickens, in middle age, appeared to be on top of the world. He was able to travel as he wished, and he spent summers in Italy. In the late 1850s, he purchased a mansion, Gad's Hill, which he had first seen and admired as a child.

Despite his worldly success, though, Dickens was beset by problems. He and his wife had a large family of 10 children, but the marriage was often troubled. In 1858, a personal crisis turned into a public scandal when Dickens left his wife and apparently began a secretive affair with actress Ellen "Nelly" Ternan, who was only 19 years old. Rumors about his private life spread. Against the advice of friends, Dickens wrote a letter defending himself, which was printed in newspapers in New York and London.

For the last 10 years of his life, Dickens was often estranged from his children, and his relationships with old friends suffered.

Though he hadn't enjoyed his tour of America in 1842, Dickens returned in late 1867. He was again welcomed warmly, and large crowds flocked to his public appearances. He toured the East Coast of the United States for five months.

He returned to England exhausted, yet continued to embark on more reading tours. Though his health was failing, the tours were lucrative, and he pushed himself to keep appearing onstage.

Dickens planned a new novel for publication in serial form. "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" began appearing in April 1870. On June 8, 1870, Dickens spent the afternoon working on the novel before suffering a stroke at dinner. He died the next day.

The funeral for Dickens was modest, and praised, according to a New York Times article, as being in keeping with the "democratic spirit of the age." Dickens was accorded a high honor, however, as he was buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, near other literary figures such as Geoffrey Chaucer , Edmund Spenser , and Dr. Samuel Johnson.

The importance of Charles Dickens in English literature remains enormous. His books have never gone out of print, and they are widely read to this day. As the works lend themselves to dramatic interpretation, numerous plays, television programs, and feature films based on them continue to appear.

Kaplan, Fred. "Dickens: a Biography." Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Tomalin, Claire. "Charles Dickens: a Life." Penguin Press, 2012.
Life of Wilkie Collins, Grandfather of the English Detective Novel
Notable Authors of the 19th Century
Biography of Bram Stoker, Irish Author
"A Tale of Two Cities" Discussion Questions
The Life and Work of H.G. Wells
Biography of Joseph Conrad, Author of Heart of Darkness
The Haunted House (1859) by Charles Dickens
Biography of Mary Shelley, English Novelist, Author of 'Frankenstein'
A Review of 'David Copperfield'
Biography of George Eliot, English Novelist
Hans Christian Andersen Biography
A Reading List of the Best 19th Century Novels
'Great Expectations' Review
Biography of James Joyce, Influential Irish Novelist
Biography of Henry Miller, Novelist
Biography of Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American Novelist

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Charles Dickens Info

The life and work of charles dickens.

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Charles Dickens Biography

Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) was a Victorian author whose novels include A Christmas Carol , Oliver Twist , and Great Expectations .

This short biography tells about his work and little-known aspects of his life.

Table of Contents

The Childhood of Charles Dickens 1812 – 1824

Dickens enters the workforce 1827 – 1831, marriage and fame 1833 – 1854, the later years 1856 – 1870.

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 in Portsmouth. The city is located in Hampshire, England and is about 70 miles southwest of London.

Birthplace of Charles Dickens, Portsmouth, England

Birthplace of Charles Dickens located in Portsmouth, England

His father, John Dickens was a clerk in a payroll office of the navy. John Dickens was the inspiration for the character of Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield .

John Dickens, the father of Charles Dickens

His mother, Elizabeth (Barrow) Dickens inspired the characters of Mrs. Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby and Mrs. Micawber in David Copperfield .

Elizabeth Dickens, the mother of Charles Dickens

Charles was the second of the couple’s eight children.

Finances were a constant concern for the family. John and Elizabeth were an outgoing, social couple. The costs of entertaining along with the expenses of having a large family were too much for John’s salary. When Charles was just four months old the family moved to a smaller home to cut costs.

Despite the family’s financial struggles, young Charles dreamed of becoming a gentleman. In 1824, when he was 12, it looked like his dreams would never come true.

That year, the family sent Charles to work in a blacking or shoe-polish factory. Charles was deeply marked by these experiences. He rarely spoke of that time of his life.

Illustration by Fred Bernard of young Charles Dickens at work in a shoe-blacking factory. (from the 1892 edition of Forster’s Life of Dickens)

Happily, John Dickens was able to come to an agreement with his creditors within a few months of his imprisonment. Shortly after that, he ended his son’s employment at the blacking factory and enrolled him in Wellington House Academy instead.

Learn more about the childhood of Charles Dickens including the influence of Mary Weller and the betrayal by his mother.

In May of 1827 Dickens left Wellington House Academy and entered the workforce as a law clerk at the firm of Ellis and Blackmore. His duties included keeping the petty cash fund, delivering documents, running errands and other sundry tasks.

In 1829 he changed careers and became a court stenographer. To qualify for that position Dickens had to learn the Gurney system of shorthand writing.

Example of Gurney Shorthand

In 1831 he became a shorthand reporter with the Mirror of Parliament. The publication gave accounts of the activity in the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

During this time Dickens considered becoming an actor. He was so serious about the matter that he arranged for an audition at the Lyceum Theater. However, he was ill on the day of his audition and could not go.

In December 1833 Charles Dickens’s first literary effort was published. It was a sketch or essay entitled A Dinner at Poplar Walk . Other sketches soon followed.

In 1834 Dickens met Catherine Hogarth, the woman who would become his wife. They became engaged in 1835 and were married in April of 1836. In January of 1837 the first of their ten children was born.

Learn more about the children of Charles Dickens . The eldest went bankrupt and was later hired by his father. “Chickenstalker” joined the Canadian Mounted Police. The youngest became a Member of Parliament in New South Wales.

The Pickwick Papers was the first novel of Charles Dickens. It was published in monthly installments from March of 1836 until November 1837.

Charles Dickens was the author of 15 novels. He also wrote short stories, essays, articles and novellas. See a list of work by Charles Dickens .

In June of 1837 something happened that only occurred once in Dickens’s career. He missed a deadline. He was writing two serialized novels at once, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist . However in June of 1837 there was no Pickwick . There was no Oliver Twist . Instead there was a funeral.

At that time, Dickens’s sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth was living with Charles and Catherine. Mary was a favorite with the couple and was like a little sister to Charles. On the evening of May 6th Mary went with the couple to the St. James Theatre. Everything seemed fine. The group returned late in the evening and Mary retired for the night. Shortly after that Dickens heard a cry from Mary’s room. She was ill. Despite her doctor’s care Mary passed away in Dickens’s arms the next day.

Dickens would relive this sad incident in his life while writing The Old Curiosity Shop . He was traumatized by the death of Little Nell in that novel. Dickens wrote to a friend about Little Nell’s death, “Old wounds bleed afresh when I think of this sad story.”

Nicholas Nickleby , the third novel of Charles Dickens, was published in installments starting in 1838. One of Dickens’s goals in writing Nicholas Nickleby was to expose the ugly truth about Yorkshire boarding schools.

In 1841 Charles and Catherine traveled to Scotland and Barnaby Rudge was published.

Charles Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth in later years

Charles and Catherine traveled to America in 1842. While on tour Dickens often spoke of the need for an international copyright agreement . The lack of such an agreement enabled his books to be published in the United States without his permission and without any royalties being paid.

The United States left quite an impression on Dickens, a very unfavorable impression.

Dickens was horrified by slavery, appalled by the common use of spitting tobacco and indignant about his treatment by the press.

His feelings came out in American Notes and later in Martin Chuzzlewit .

As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening. In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognised. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit incessantly. ~ American Notes by Charles Dickens

Sketch of Charles Dickens in 1842 (Small image on the bottom left is his sister, Fanny)

In 1842 Catherine’s sister, Georgina, came to live with the couple. Georgina helped with the children and the house. She remained part of the Dickens household until the death of her brother-in-law.

In September of 1843 Dickens visited the Field Lane Ragged School. In a letter to his friend, Miss Coutts, he described what he saw at the school:

I have very seldom seen, in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children. And although I know; and am as sure as it is possible for one to be of anything which has not happened; that in the prodigious misery and ignorance of the swarming masses of mankind in England, the seeds of its certain ruin are sown.

In October of that year Dickens began work on A Christmas Carol . It was published on December 19, 1843.

Publication of Dombey and Son began in 1846. It was Dickens’s seventh novel.

1851 was a difficult year. John Dickens, the father of Charles Dickens, died in March. Catherine Dickens suffered a nervous collapse. Later Dora Dickens , the youngest daughter of Charles and Catherine, died when she was only eight months old.

There were also bright spots in 1851. It was the year that Dickens moved into Tavistock House. It was there that he wrote Bleak House , H ard Times and Little Dorrit .

Dickens bought Gad’s Hill Place in 1856. He would own the home for the rest of his life.

The above photo shows Dickens at Gad’s Hill in 1862. The back row from left to right is; H.F. Chorley, Kate Dickens, Mamie Dickens and Charles Dickens. Seated are C.A. Collins and Georgina Hogarth.

In 1857 Dickens met the woman who was to be his companion until his death, Ellen Ternan.

Dickens had already become disenchanted with his wife. He wrote to a friend, “Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too—and much more so.”

Meeting Ellen stressed the differences between the marriage Dickens had and the relationship that he wanted. Later in 1857 Charles and Catherine took separate bedrooms. In 1858 they legally separated.

In 1858 Charles Dickens began giving professional readings. The readings were a combination of oratory and passionate acting. They were very popular and Dickens continued to give them throughout his life.

“Charles Dickens as he appears when reading.” Illustration in Harper’s Weekly, December 1867.

Charles Dickens founded the weekly publication All the Year Round. The first issue was printed in April of 1859. Dickens served as editor and publisher. One feature of the publication was its serialization of novels. The first novel serialized in All the Year Round was A Tale of Two Cities .

Publication of Great Expectations began in 1860. It was also serialized in All the Year Round.

In June of 1865 Charles Dickens had a brush with death. Dickens, Ellen Ternan and her mother were involved in the Staplehurst railway accident . The train’s first seven carriages went off a bridge that was being repaired.

Dickens was uninjured and helped people that were hurt in the accident. When help finally arrived and the accident scene was being evacuated Dickens remembered something. He made his way back into the wrecked train one last time to retrieve the latest installment of Our Mutual Friend , the novel he was writing at the time.

It would be the last novel he ever completed.

Dickens returned to America in 1867 for an extensive reading tour.

In 1869 Dickens’s doctor advised him against giving further public readings. The events were popular, but the strain to his system was too great.

In October of 1869, at Gad’s Hill Place, Dickens began work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood . He would never finish it.

Dickens arranged a farewell tour and gave his last reading in March of 1870. It is thought that the effects of the readings was one of the factors leading to his death.

On June 9, 1870 Dickens died at Gad’s Hill Place.

10 Charles Dickens Novels Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

When he died aged 58 in 1870, Charles Dickens left behind fifteen novels, five Christmas books, several volumes of travel writing, and dozens of journalistic pieces and short stories. But what are the ten books that best exemplify Dickens’s genius, his unique comic achievement, and those qualities which we tend to think of when we hear the word ‘Dickensian’? Undoubtedly a fool’s errand.

But we’ll give it a go anyway, if nothing else because it’s an excuse to share some great trivia about Dickens’s finest books.

10. A Tale of Two Cities (1859).

Reckoned to be one of the bestselling novels in English ever written, with an estimated 200 million copies sold worldwide, this is, in many ways, an oddly uncharacteristic Dickens novel. It’s shorter than most of his novels, and the humour and caricature are both used more sparingly.

Perhaps this is due to the historical events Dickens is depicting – the novel is set during the French Revolution. Still, it’s beautifully told, right down to the famous last statement from Sydney Carton – but to say more than that would be to offer a spoiler…

9. Little Dorrit (1857).

For this novel, Dickens drew on his own childhood experiences, which were blighted by his father’s imprisonment for debt (and Charles being put to work in a blacking factory aged 12). In this doorstop of a novel, Dickens casts a satirical eye over bureaucracy: Dickens coined the phrase ‘red tapeworm’ to describe a bureaucratic official, not exactly Dickens’s favourite sort of person.

The Circumlocution Office with its ‘motto’, How Not to Do It, has become shorthand for feckless red tape and ineffectual government departments.

8. Dombey and Son (1848).

One of our favourite pieces of Dickens trivia pertaining to this underrated novel is that it provides the earliest known use of the word ‘dustbin’. But that’s probably not going to send many people to this 800-page beast of a novel. Nor should it be read for Dickens’s somewhat overblown and sentimental treatment of the titular character’s neglect of his daughter, Florence (perhaps the first person to be called Florence in all fiction).

No, it should be read instead for the marvellous descriptions of the emerging railway network and its effect upon the English landscape, and for the panoply of comic characters; our favourite is Major ‘Joe’ Bagstock, with his purple face and repeated assurances that he is ‘tough – and devil-ish sly’.

Readers are bound to find echoes of their grandparents in some of the other more senior characters, too, among them Miss Tox, whom the Major has his eye on.

We have discussed this underrated classic Dickens novel in more detail here .

7. Our Mutual Friend (1865).

Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend is, like many of his novels, a huge beast with various subplots, a large cast of characters, and a mystery at its centre. The novel’s unifying theme is money and its power to corrupt.

T. S. Eliot’s working title for his poem The Waste Land was ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, which he took from Our Mutual Friend – the character Sloppy reads out newspaper reports to Betty Higden and puts on different voices for the various people mentioned in the report.

6. The Pickwick Papers (1837).

Dickens’s very first novel, The Pickwick Papers demonstrates his indebtedness to the eighteenth-century picaresque novels about journeys and tours, notably those by Smollett and Fielding. As such, it is less a ‘novel’ than a series of loosely linked adventures and episodes, with some inset tales (including Dickens’s first ever Christmas ghost story ).

After a rocky start, it soon became a huge success, after Dickens created a valet for his title character, the crafty cockney Sam Weller, whose comic turns of phrase earned him a dedicated following. (We’ve discussed the origins of Sam Weller in our post on Dickens and catchphrases .)

The tie-ins and spin-offs for the novel included ‘Pickwick pastries’ and ‘Fat Boy sweets’, and a medical condition, Pickwickian Syndrome – describing the difficulties in breathing that obese people experience – was even named in honour of the title character.

5. Oliver Twist (1839).

This novel is perhaps most famous for the early scenes involving the parish workhouse, in which the young Oliver – egged on by his fellow half-starved waifs – politely asks for more gruel. These scenes, though, occupy only the first third of the book, which then sees Oliver transported from his local parish to London. (The subtitle of the book is ‘The Parish Boy’s Progress’.)

There, of course, he meets the Artful Dodger, Charley Bates (referred to by Dickens mischievously as ‘Master Bates’ throughout), and the rest of the gang of pickpockets, led by Fagin (who himself is under the thrall of the criminal mastermind, Bill Sikes).

4. Great Expectations (1861).

This is one of Dickens’s greatest novels, and certainly one of the most popular among film directors and TV executives. It’s been adapted a number of times for both the big and small screen. One of the most remarkable things about Great Expectations is how quickly Dickens conceived and executed the idea for the novel: it was, essentially, the result of an editorial crisis.

Dickens’s new periodical, All the Year Round , was suffering from poor sales: the publication’s novel serialisation, Charles Lever’s A Day’s Ride, A Life’s Romance was not exactly a big hit with readers. In order to fix the problem, Dickens quickly replaced Lever’s novel with a new offering from the biggest name in the business, Charles Dickens.

The tale of the young boy who becomes a gentleman thanks to a mysterious benefactor has been enchanting readers – and many, many film directors – since.

3. A Christmas Carol (1843).

Technically this isn’t a ‘novel’ but a novella, but it’s one of Dickens’s finest books and certainly one of his most influential. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks, and it was published just six days before Christmas Day in 1843. Dickens’s rival, the author of Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray, called the book ‘a national benefit’, while fellow novelist Margaret Oliphant said that although it was ‘the apotheosis of turkey and plum pudding’, it ‘moved us all in those days as if it had been a new gospel’.

The book was more or less single-handedly responsible for the tradition of the Christmas Eve ghost story, which remains with us to this day. For these and other reasons, which we’ve outlined in a previous post , this Dickens book – although not a full-length novel – earns its place on this list.

2. David Copperfield (1850).

Dickens’s most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield is, like Great Expectations , a great Bildungsroman of a novel told from the perspective of the protagonist. Dickens himself can be glimpsed in numerous aspects of the book, from the title character and narrator (whose initials are the author’s reversed) to the eccentric Mr Dick, who lives with David’s aunt Betsey Trotwood and is afflicted by the ‘trouble’ of King Charles I, who won’t get out of poor Mr Dick’s head.

Other memorable characters include Wilkins Micawber, who is always in dire financial straits but remains optimistic that ‘something will turn up’ (this character was another inspired by Dickens’s father).

1. Bleak House (1853).

This novel, written when Charles Dickens was at the height of his powers and following the Jarndyce v Jarndyce court case, is – for our money – the best of the lot.

It has all of the most recognisably ‘Dickensian’ qualities: indictment of poverty and the conditions of the poor, a cast of colourful characters from all walks of life, and vivid descriptions of London (from the very first chapter’s depiction of that ‘London particular’, fog and the suggestion that it wouldn’t be unusual to see a Megalosaurus coming down Holborn Hill), Bleak House is by turns comic and profound, panoptic and microscopic in equal measure.

Recommended edition: Bleak House (Oxford World’s Classics) .

You may quibble over the order – should Bleak House be first, in your list? – but we’d say that most of the above would find a place on the majority of Dickens fans’ lists of his best novels. What would you put at the number 1 spot?

Continue to explore the world of Dickensiana with our discussion of his forgotten history book for children , this blog post about Dickens and London , and our pick of the best biographies and critical studies of Dickens’s work . For more book recommendations, see our selection of the best classic Gothic horror novels .

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20 thoughts on “10 Charles Dickens Novels Everyone Should Read”

I don’t completely agree with your order, but I do agree that Bleak House is the best and the six you left off the list are the poorest of the novels, though I think they all have their merits.

As Dickens would say, “Happy Christmas!” I’ll look forward to more great posts in the New Year.

Tyler Tichelaar

I’ll perhaps give you my considered opinion when I’ve got round to all Dickens’ novels — as it is I’ve only read a handful and seen dramatisations of a couple I haven’t yet read! Looking forward to BBC1’s upcoming serial / soap Dickensian in the hopes of getting to grips with characters I’m not yet familiar with.

When I was living in Slovakia, books in English were few and far between and very expensive on a Peace Corps budget. However, I found a little book store that sold paperback classic novels in English for $2 each. I spent one joyous winter re-reading the works of Charles Dickens. Thank you for this post. Have a Merry Christmas and a most wonderful New Year.

Thank you – Merry Christmas to you too! :)

I haven’t got around to reading OUR MUTUAL FRIEND – but thanks to your enjoyable, informative article, it will be near the top of my TBR pile for 2016…

Thanks for the recommendations! I’ve only read “A Christmas Carol,” but I’ve loved the movie adaptions of “Great Expectations” and “Bleak House.” I haven’t read “Martin Chuzzlewit,” but I grew up watching the miniseries (with Pete Posthlewait). I will add all of these to my (ever growing!) to-read list. :)

I love Dickens. My personal favorite is Great Expectations.

“Great Expectations” is my favorite and “A Tale of Two Cities” is a close second.

Reblogged this on Carolyn O' Connell and commented: Have read them all

Also, not everyone realises that before A Christmas Carol he wrote Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton – the prototype for Christmas Carol. He wrote a number of other Xmas stories. An excellent compilation with informative Intro is a Penguin Classic, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings.

Indeed – we’ve written about that fantastic Gabriel Grub story here: http://interestingliterature.com/2014/12/17/the-advent-calendar-of-literature-day-17/

Thanks erikleo

I am currently reading Great Expectations and loving it, but I think that Hard Times should make it on the list. Dickens doesn’t always write well-developed characters. Sometimes I think this is deliberate (he uses caricatures and the grotesque to expose the dark-side if Industrial London), but other times I feel that his characters are one-dimensional to a fault. For example, his female characters tend to be sweet, innocent angels. However, in his later writings his characters are a lot more complex. I am seeing this in Great Expectations, his penultimate work. I think Hard Times is one of Dickens’ best works because all the characters are interesting and Dickens doesn’t go off on tangents that add nothing to the story or our understanding of the characters (something he does too much of in his earlier writings)

I’ve now officially put “Bleak House” on my 2016 reading list. I do love “Tale of Two Cities,” though and, in my youth, fancied myself a Sydney Carton. I just never had a cause to do a far, far better thing for.

My order would be Bleak House, David Copperfield and then either Little Dorrit or Our Mutual Friend. I don’t think I’d have A Tale of Two Cities on the list at all, as I think it is one of his worst books.

I haven’t read every Dickens novel, so I can’t argue with your selection. However, I do agree with you on most of the ten. My favourites (not necessarily his best novels in a literary sense) are Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and, to disagree with the previous contributor, A Tale of Two Cities.

Reblogged this on all things biblio and commented: In the new year I must get to reading Bleak House – it’s been on my shelf since I picked it up secondhand months ago.

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I’m so curious to know about the source of the illustration in section 4: Great Expectations on this website:

https://interestingliterature.com/2015/12/10-charles-dickens-novels-everyone-should-read/

Could you be a little more specific about this? Who is the illustrator?

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Charles Dickens

Classic Literature
Classic Authors

Charles Dickens Biography

Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), probably the best-known and, to many people, the greatest English novelist of the 19th century. A moralist, satirist, and social reformer, Dickens crafted complex plots and striking characters that capture the panorama of English society.

Dickens's novels criticize the injustices of his time, especially the brutal treatment of the poor in a society sharply divided by differences of wealth. But he presents this criticism through the lives of characters that seem to live and breathe. Paradoxically, they often do so by being flamboyantly larger than life: The 20th-century poet and critic T. S. Eliot wrote, "Dickens's characters are real because there is no one like them." Yet though these characters range through the sentimental, grotesque, and humorous, few authors match Dickens's psychological realism and depth. Dickens's novels rank among the funniest and most gripping ever written, among the most passionate and persuasive on the topic of social justice, and among the most psychologically telling and insightful works of fiction. They are also some of the most masterful works in terms of artistic form, including narrative structure, repeated motifs, consistent imagery, juxtaposition of symbols, stylization of characters and settings, and command of language.

Dickens established (and made profitable) the method of first publishing novels in serial instalments in monthly magazines. He thereby reached a larger audience including those who could only afford their reading on such an instalment plan. This form of publication soon became popular with other writers in Britain and the United States.

II Early Years

Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on England's southern coast. His father was a clerk in the British Navy pay office a respectable position, but with little social status. His paternal grandparents, a steward (property manager) and a housekeeper, possessed even less status, having been servants, and Dickens later concealed their background. Dickens's mother supposedly came from a more respectable family. Yet two years before Dickens's birth, his mother's father was caught embezzling and fled to Europe, never to return.

The family's increasing poverty forced Dickens out of school at age 12 to work in Warren's Blacking Warehouse, a shoe-polish factory, where the other working boys mocked him as "the young gentleman." His father was then imprisoned for debt. The humiliations of his father's imprisonment and his labor in the blacking factory formed Dickens's greatest wound and became his deepest secret. He could not confide them even to his wife, although they provide the unacknowledged foundation of his fiction.

Soon after his father's release from prison, Dickens got a better job as errand boy in law offices. He taught himself shorthand to get an even better job later as a court stenographer and as a reporter in Parliament. At the same time, Dickens, who had a reporter's eye for transcribing the life around him, especially anything comic or odd, submitted short sketches to obscure magazines. The first published sketch, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk" (later retitled "Mr. Minns and His Cousin") brought tears to Dickens's eyes when he discovered it in the pages of The Monthly Magazine in 1833. From then on his sketches, which appeared under the pen name "Boz" (rhymes with "rose") in The Evening Chronicle, earned him a modest reputation. Boz originated as a childhood nickname for Dickens's younger brother Augustus.

Dickens became a regular visitor at the home of George Hogarth, editor of The Evening Chronicle, and in 1835 became engaged to Hogarth's daughter Catherine. Publication of the collected Sketches by Boz in 1836 gave Dickens sufficient income to marry Catherine Hogarth that year. The marriage proved unhappy.

III Literary Career

Soon after Sketches by Boz appeared, the fledgling publishing firm of Chapman and Hall approached Dickens to write a story in monthly instalments. The publisher intended the story as a backdrop for a series of woodcuts by the then-famous artist Robert Seymour, who had originated the idea for the story. With characteristic confidence, Dickens, although younger and relatively unknown, successfully insisted that Seymour's pictures illustrate his own story instead. After the first instalment, Dickens wrote to the artist he had displaced to correct a drawing he felt was not faithful enough to his prose. Seymour made the change, went into his backyard, and expressed his displeasure by blowing his brains out. Dickens and his publishers simply pressed on with a new artist. The comic novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, appeared serially in 1836 and 1837 and was first published in book form The Pickwick Papers in 1837.

The runaway success of The Pickwick Papers , as it is generally known today, clinched Dickens's fame. There were Pickwick coats and Pickwick cigars, and the plump, spectacled hero, Samuel Pickwick, became a national figure. Four years later, Dickens's readers found Dolly Varden, the heroine of Barnaby Rudge (1841), so irresistible that they named a waltz, a rose, and even a trout for her. The widespread familiarity today with Ebenezer Scrooge and his proverbial hard-heartedness from A Christmas Carol (1843) demonstrate that Dickens's characters live on in the popular imagination.

Dickens published 15 novels, one of which was left unfinished at his death. These novels are, in order of publication with serialization dates given first: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837; 1837); The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837-1839; 1838); The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839; 1839); The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841; 1841); Barnaby Rudge (1841); Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844; 1844); Dombey and Son (1846-1848; 1848); The Personal History of David Copperfield (1849-1850; 1850); Bleak House (1852-1853; 1853); Hard Times (1854); Little Dorrit (1855-1857; 1857); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Great Expectations (1860-1861; 1861); Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865; 1865); and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished; 1870).

Through his fiction Dickens did much to highlight the worst abuses of 19th-century society and to prick the public conscience. But running through the main plot of the novels are a host of subplots concerning fascinating and sometime ludicrous minor characters. Much of the humor of the novels derives from Dickens's descriptions of these characters and from his ability to capture their speech mannerisms and idiosyncratic traits.

A Early Fiction

Dickens was influenced by the reading of his youth and even by the stories his nursemaid created, such as the continuing saga of Captain Murderer. These childhood stories, as well as the melodramas and pantomimes he saw in the theater as a boy, fired Dickens's imagination throughout his life. His favorite boyhood readings included picaresque novels such as Don Quixote by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes and Tom Jones by English novelist Henry Fielding, as well as the Arabian Nights. In these long comic works, a roguish hero's exploits and adventures loosely link a series of stories.

The Pickwick Papers , for example, is a wandering comic epic in which Samuel Pickwick acts as a plump and cheerful Don Quixote, and Sam Weller as a cockney version of Quixote's knowing servant, Sancho Panza. The novel's preposterous characters, high spirits, and absurd adventures delighted readers.

After Pickwick, Dickens plunged into a bleaker world. In Oliver Twist , he traces an orphan's progress from the workhouse to the criminal slums of London. Nicholas Nickleby , his next novel, combines the darkness of Oliver Twist with the sunlight of Pickwick. Rascality and crime are part of its jubilant mirth.

The Old Curiosity Shop broke hearts across Britain and North America when it first appeared. Later readers, however, have found it excessively sentimental, especially the pathos surrounding the death of its child-heroine Little Nell. Dickens's next two works proved less popular with the public.

Barnaby Rudge , Dickens's first historical novel, revolves around anti-Catholic riots that broke out in London in 1780. The events in Martin Chuzzlewit become a vehicle for the novel's theme: selfishness and its evils. The characters, especially the Chuzzlewit family, present a multitude of perspectives on greed and unscrupulous self-interest. Dickens wrote it after a trip to the United States in 1842.

B Mature Fiction

Many critics have cited Dombey and Son as the work in which Dickens's style matures and he succeeds in bringing multiple episodes together in a tight narrative. Set in the world of railroad-building during the 1840s, Dombey and Son looks at the social effects of the profit-driven approach to business. The novel was immediately successful.

Dickens always considered David Copperfield to be his best novel and the one he most liked. The beginning seems to be autobiographical, with David's childhood experiences recalling Dickens's own in the blacking factory. The unifying theme of the book is the "undisciplined heart" of the young David, which leads to all his mistakes, including the greatest of them, his mistaken first marriage.

Bleak House ushers in Dickens's final period as a satirist and social critic. A court case involving an inheritance forms the mainspring of the plot, and ultimately connects all of the characters in the novel. The dominant image in the book is fog, which envelops, entangles, veils, and obscures. The fog stands for the law, the courts, vested interests, and corrupt institutions. Dickens had a long-standing dislike of the legal system and protracted lawsuits from his days as a reporter in the courts.

A novel about industry, Hard Times , followed Bleak House in 1854. In Hard Times , Dickens satirizes the theories of political economists through exaggerated characters such as Mr. Bounderby, the self-made man motivated by greed, and Mr. Gradgrind, the schoolmaster who emphasizes facts and figures over all else. In Bounderby's mines, lives are ground down; in Gradgrind's classroom, imagination and feelings are strangled.

The pervading image of Little Dorrit is the jail. Dickens's memory of his own father's time in debtors' prison adds an autobiographical touch to the novel. Little Dorrit also contains Dickens's invention of the Circumlocution Office, the archetype of all bureaucracies, where nothing ever gets done. Through this critique and others, such as the circular legal system in Bleak House , Dickens also investigated the ways in which art makes meaning and the workings of his own narrative style.

A Tale of Two Cities is set in London and Paris during the French Revolution (1789-1799). It stands out among the novels as a work driven by incident and event rather than by character and is critical both of the violence of the mob and of the abuses of the aristocracy, which prompted the revolution. The successful Tale of Two Cities was soon followed by Great Expectations , which marked a return to the more familiar Dickensian style of character-driven narrative. Its main character, Pip, tells his own story. Pip's "great expectations" are to lead an idle life of luxury. Through Pip, Dickens exposes that ideal as false.

Dickens's last complete novel is the dark and powerful Our Mutual Friend . A tale of greed and obsession, it takes place in an ill-lit and dirty London, with images of darkness and decay throughout. Only 6 of the 12 intended parts of Edwin Drood had been completed by the time Dickens died. He intended it as a mystery story concerning the disappearance of the title character.

IV Final Years

The end of Dickens's life was emotionally scarred by his separation from his dutiful wife, Catherine, as the result of his involvement with a young actress, Ellen Ternan. Catherine bore him ten children during their 22-year marriage, but he found her increasingly dull and unsympathetic. Against the advice of editors, Dickens published a letter vehemently justifying his actions to his readers, who would otherwise have known nothing about them.

Following the separation, Dickens continued his hectic schedule of novel, story, essay, and letter writing (his collected letters alone stretch thousands of pages); reform activities; amateur theatricals and readings; in addition to nightly social engagements and long midnight walks through London. His energy had always seemed to his friends inhuman, but he maintained this activity in his later years in disregard of failing health. Dickens died of a stroke shortly after his farewell reading tour, while writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood .

V Achievement

Dickens's social critique in his novels was sharp and pointed. As his biographer Edgar Johnson observed in Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952), Dickens's criticism was aimed not just at "the cruelty of the workhouse and the foundling asylum, the enslavement of human beings in mines and factories, the hideous evil of slums where crime simmered and proliferated, the injustices of the law, and the cynical corruption of the lawmakers" but also at "the great evil permeating every field of human endeavour: the entire structure of exploitation on which the social order was founded."

British writer George Orwell felt that Dickens was not a revolutionary, however, despite his criticism of society's ills. Orwell points out that Dickens "has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong." That instinctive feeling becomes so moving in the novels because Dickens made the injustices he hated concrete and specific, not abstract and general. His readers feel the abuses of 19th-century society as real through the life of his characters. Underlying and reinforcing that illusion of reality, however, is a rich and complicated system of symbolic imagery resulting from superb artistry.

Through his characters, Dickens also touched a range of readers, which was perhaps his greatest talent. As his friend John Forster wrote, his stories enthralled "judges on the bench and boys in the street" alike. The illiterate, often too poor to buy instalments themselves, pooled their pennies and got someone to read aloud to them.

Near the end of the serialization of The Old Curiosity Shop , crowds thronged to a New York pier to await the ship from London carrying the latest instalment. As it came to the dock people roared, "Is Little Nell dead?" The pathetic death of the novel's child-heroine, Nell Trent, became one of the most celebrated scenes in 19th-century fiction. Such public concern over Little Nell's end guaranteed that Dickens's social message would be heard, not only by his avid readers, but also by those in power.

Dickens was a careful craftsman, with a strong sense of design; his books were strictly outlined. Any current notions that Dickens's novels are long because he was paid by the word, or sloppy because he wrote them under pressure of monthly deadlines, are simply untrue. What organizes Dickens's stories is sometimes not apparent at first glance, although it makes sense in novels that emphasize character. It is the logic of psychology, the tensions and contradictions of our drives and emotions, which Dickens plumbed, laying side by side the best and the worst of the human heart. This is a very different logic from the order of realism that rests on common sense. Dickens detested common sense, seeing in its seeming obviousness a form of tyranny.

The theater was a crucial influence on Dickens's work. As a young man Dickens tried to go on stage, but he missed his audition because of a cold. Not only did Dickens later write comic plays, melodramas, and libretti (words for musical dramas), he was also often involved in amateur theatricals for good causes, and spent his last two decades reading his own stories to packed audiences. Dickens's readings were as much a sensation in England and America as was his writing, and they proved as profitable. The readings revealed the part of the man that made him a practiced magician and hypnotist as well.

Dickens's love of the theatrical makes his works lend themselves readily to media adaptations. Motion-picture or television versions exist for almost every one of them. A Christmas Carol was one of the earliest to be adapted, first appearing as the silent film Scrooge (1901), directed by Walter R. Booth. The most notable adaptations include A Christmas Carol (1938), directed by Edwin L. Marin and starring Reginald Owen, and, probably the most famous of all, A Christmas Carol (1951), directed by Brian Desmond Hart and starring Alastair Sim. A later production titled Scrooged (1988) was directed by Richard Donner and starred Bill Murray. David Lean directed the most famous of the many versions of Great Expectations (1946). The film Oliver! (1968), a musical based on Oliver Twist and directed by Carol Reed, won six Academy Awards. Nowadays people are probably more familiar with the many BBC television miniseries productions of Dickens's works.

Contributed By: Laurie Langbauer, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. Professor of English, University of North Carolina. Author of Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850-1930.

Charles Dickens: A Biography

Charles dickens 1812-1870.

Charles Dickens was an extraordinary man. He is best known as a novelist but he was very much more than that. He was as prominent in his other pursuits but they were not areas of life where we can still see him today. We see him as the author of such classics as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House and many others. All of his novels are English classics.

Dickens had an almost unbelievable level of energy. In addition to writing all those lengthy books in long-hand, he had time to pursue what would have been full-time careers for most people in acting, literary editing social campaigning and philanthropic administration. He was also the father of a large family, as well as being involved in a love affair that lasted many years.

He began as a journalist, writing little pieces about daily life and developed very quickly into a best-selling novelist, avidly read throughout the English speaking world. At the same time he was appearing in plays and touring, reading from his novels. And editing his literary hournals, Household Words and All the Year Round , which featured the serialisation of his novels, with people queuing up to buy them, eager to find out how the previous episode would be concluded.

Charles Dickens photograph

As a child Dickens saw his father imprisoned for debt and that led him to a lifelong interest in prisons and the need for the reform of the system. Many of his novels reveal the cold hard facts of the Victorian prison system and, with so many readers, the novels had a great effect on the consciousness of the public. In addition to that Dickens campaigned and lobbied for reform.

Dickens was a man who seemed to be able to direct his efforts in several directions and give each his full attention. He spent ten years running Urania Cottage, a home for ‘fallen women.’ And organisation aimed at helping the women get back to respectable life, either in England or Australia or America. He spent his own money on the project and gave it his full attention.

It is difficult to imagine English culture without the characters who inhabit Dickens’ novels. Just a mention of the name ‘Miss Havisham,’ brings up the image of someone embittered and socially marginalised, living in an unreal world that has stopped turning. ‘Mr Gradgrind’ creates the image of inflexibility and Mr McCawber the delusional optimist, always relying on his cheerful belief that something will turn up to solve his problems, makes us shake our heads with a mixture of amusement and pity.

Where would English culture be if there had been no Fagin, no Oliver Twist, no Ebenezer Scrooge? What graphic image would we have of a fawning, writhing, hypocritical functionary without Uriah Heep springing into our minds? And what about the pompous Mr Bumble and the cruel, cold-hearted Mr Murdstone and his iron sister, Miss Murdstone? The list of Dickens characters who have embedded themselves firmly in English culture is endless, and we’ve had a go at pulling together their many thoughts and sayings in this list of the most well known Charles Dickens quotes .

Dickens’ novels, which lend themselves to dramatisation for stage, television and film, are delightful to read and several are regarded as the greatest of English novels. Indeed, Bleak House is acclaimed by critics as being among the greatest of world novels, in the same category as Huckleberry Finn , Crime and Punishment , War and Peace , Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick .

Read biographies of the top 10 English writers >>

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Interested in Charles Dickens? If so you can get some additional free information by visiting our friends over at PoemAnalysis to read their analysis of Dicken’s poetic works .

Pinterest 0

There pride and prejudice is not written by him there is a mention in the article. It is written by jane austen

Wow. Really awesome article. Can I get his book online?

The humour in Pickwick Papers is wonderful, and his descriptions of that world are just as if Dickens himself was talking to me. It’s as close to space travel as one can get.

how can I get this?

All line understood, really ur writting styles is beauty

He is a wonderful short story writer

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Charles Dickens Biography
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COMMENTS

Five of the Best Books about Charles Dickens
Peter Ackroyd, Dickens: Abridged. This is still one of the best biographies - perhaps the best biography - of Charles Dickens out there.True, the biography written by Dickens's friend John Forster and published shortly after Dickens's death is a hugely important source of information about the novelist's life, but Ackroyd's detailed picture of Victorian England and Dickens's ...
Charles Dickens Biographies
The Dickens biographies published just in the past 25 years make an impressive stack. Given his uncanny genius and the vivid complexity of his life, that's not a complaint. Still, in all these ...
11 of the best Charles Dickens books (for every type of reader)
Hard Times. by Charles Dickens. Buy the book. Set in Coketown, an imaginary town inspired by Preston, Hard Times is a novel of social and moral themes which George Bernard Shaw called a 'passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world.'. A savage satire of the social and economic conditions of the time, it addresses ...
The Best Charles Dickens Books
1 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. 2 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. 3 Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. 4 The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens by Jenny Hartley. 5 Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies by John Bowen and Robert I. Patten. B efore we discuss the books, you've been president of the Dickens ...
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens (born February 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England—died June 9, 1870, Gad's Hill, near Chatham, Kent) was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian era. His many volumes include such works as A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our ...
The Top 10 Charles Dickens Books
8. Dombey and Son - A powerful tragedy of a distant, cold businessman who comes to realize too late the value of his worthy daughter, Florence, after the death of his beloved son, Paul - Dickens ...
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (/ ˈ d ɪ k ɪ n z /; 7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and social critic.He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. [1] His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics ...
Charles Dickens: Biography, British Author, Editor
Best known for his fiction writing, Dickens wrote a total of 15 novels between 1836 and 1870. His first was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, ... In The Life of Charles Dickens, ...
The Essentials: Charles Dickens
It is the funniest book on Dickens ever written. Dickens (1990), by Peter Ackroyd. This tome of 1,000-plus pages by Peter Ackroyd, a biographer who has also made Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot his ...
10 of the Best Charles Dickens Books
These include 'Great Expectations,' 'A Christmas Carol,' and 'Oliver Twist.'. B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University. On this list, readers can explore ten of the best books that Charles Dickens wrote throughout his life. Some were more critically successful than others, but all are read to ...
The Mystery of Charles Dickens has been named the best biography of the
At this weekend's annual conference of Biographers International Organization, A.N. Wilson's The Mystery of Charles Dickens (HarperCollins) was awarded the BIO Plutarch Award—an award celebrating the best biography of the last year published in English, as chosen from nominations received by publishers and BIO members. The Mystery of Charles Dickens was chosen from five other […]
Early life and literary career of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens, (born Feb. 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, Eng.—died June 9, 1870, Gad's Hill, near Chatham, Kent), British novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period.The defining moment of Dickens's life occurred when he was 12 years old. With his father in debtors' prison, he was withdrawn from school and forced to work in a factory.
The Life of Charles Dickens
Catherine Dickens. (1815-1879) - Charles Dickens' wife, with whom he fathered 10 children. She was born in Scotland on May 19, 1815 and came to England with her family in 1834. Catherine was the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle where Dickens was a young journalist.
6 Must-Read Charles Dickens Books: Where To Start
6 Must-Read Charles Dickens Books. For readers looking to explore books by Charles Dickens, here is a list of six must-read books: A Tale of Two Cities. Oliver Twist. A Christmas Carol. Great Expectations. David Copperfield. The Pickwick Papers.
Charles Dickens' 10 best novels ranked: The Christmas Carol author's
Charles Dickens' 10 best novels ranked: The Christmas Carol author's greatest works from Bleak House to Oliver Twist. Victorian novelist offers wealth of unforgettable characters and some of the ...
Charles Dickens: the Man, the Myth, the Brand
The trouble, according to Helena Kelly's new book, "The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens," is "simply that Forster wasn't a very good biographer.". For decades Forster, a writer and ...
Biography of Charles Dickens, English Novelist
Updated on June 18, 2019. Charles Dickens (February 7, 1812-June 9, 1870) was a popular English novelist of the Victorian era, and to this day he remains a giant in British literature. Dickens wrote numerous books that are now considered classics, including "David Copperfield," "Oliver Twist," "A Tale of Two Cities," and "Great Expectations."
Dickens by Peter Ackroyd
Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has ...
Charles Dickens: Six things he gave the modern world
Charles Dickens is one of the most important writers of the 19th Century. But his influence goes far beyond just literature. Many of his phrases, characters and ideas have engrained themselves in ...
Charles Dickens Biography
Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870) was a Victorian author whose novels include A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations. This short biography tells about his work and little-known aspects of his life. Table of Contents. The Childhood of Charles Dickens 1812 - 1824. Dickens Enters the Workforce 1827 - 1831.
Charles Dickens: Biography, Novels, and Literary Style
Charles Dickens: Biography, Novels, and Literary Style. Written by MasterClass. Last updated: Jul 27, 2022 • 7 min read. One of the most famous British authors of all time, Charles Dickens's literary style is so unique and influential it has its own adjective: Dickensian. Learn more about his life and novels.
10 Charles Dickens Novels Everyone Should Read
Recommended edition: Little Dorrit (Wordsworth Classics). 8. Dombey and Son (1848). One of our favourite pieces of Dickens trivia pertaining to this underrated novel is that it provides the earliest known use of the word 'dustbin'. But that's probably not going to send many people to this 800-page beast of a novel.
Charles Dickens Biography
Charles Dickens Biography. Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), probably the best-known and, to many people, the greatest English novelist of the 19th century. A moralist, satirist, and social reformer, Dickens crafted complex plots and striking characters that capture the panorama of English society.
Charles Dickens Overview: A Biography Of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens 1812-1870. Charles Dickens was an extraordinary man. He is best known as a novelist but he was very much more than that. He was as prominent in his other pursuits but they were not areas of life where we can still see him today. We see him as the author of such classics as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A ...

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The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens by Jenny Hartley

Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies by John Bowen and Robert I. Patten

1 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

The Top 10 Charles Dickens Books

Charles Dickens

Quick Facts

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

Oliver Twist

Nicholas Nickleby

The Old Curiosity Shop

Barnaby Rudge

Martin Chuzzlewit

Dombey and Son

David Copperfield

Bleak House

Little Dorrit

A Tale of Two Cities

Great Expectations

Our Mutual Friend

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Famous British People

ARTS & CULTURE

Charles Dickens’ Best Books 📚

Great Expectations

A Christmas Carol

David Copperfield

Oliver Twist

Bleak House

The Pickwick Papers

Hard Times

Nicholas Nickleby

Little Dorrit

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

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About Emma Baldwin

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Charles Dickens summary

Learn more about Charles Dickens:

Dickens Timelines

Catherine Dickens

What Shall We Have for Dinner?

The Life of Charles Dickens

The Law and Early Journalism

The Early Novels

The Middle Years

The Later Years

6 Must-Read Charles Dickens Books: Where To Start

Who is Charles Dickens?

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