Where to Start with Charles Dickens: A Reading Guide

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) is the most widely read English novelist of the nineteenth century — and arguably the most widely read English novelist ever. His fifteen major novels, written in serial form for Victorian periodicals, created a cast of characters so vivid that many are still household names: Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist, Miss Havisham, Uriah Heep. He wrote about poverty, injustice, and the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution with a combination of comedy and moral seriousness that no subsequent writer has equalled.

Where to Start

The Best Entry Point: Great Expectations (1860–61)

The universally recommended starting point. Pip’s journey from the Kent marshes to London — from orphan to gentleman, from innocence to disillusionment — is Dickens’s most precisely structured coming-of-age story and his most concentrated social argument about the relationship between wealth and worth. The novel is shorter than David Copperfield or Bleak House, its plot is tighter, and its principal characters — Miss Havisham in her decaying wedding dress, the terrifying convict Magwitch, the beautiful and cruel Estella — are among Dickens’s most memorable creations. The ending (Dickens revised it twice; the revised version is the standard) is satisfying without being sentimental.

The Shortest: A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

The best starting point for readers who want plot and historical drama. The French Revolution, the double life of Sydney Carton, and the famous final sacrifice make this the most movie-like of Dickens’s novels. It is shorter than any of the others listed here and more consistently driven by event than by character. What it lacks is the richness of Dickensian eccentricity — the proliferating minor characters, the grotesque comedy — that makes his longer novels so inhabitable. An excellent entry point for reluctant readers.

The Social Critique: Oliver Twist (1837–39)

Dickens’s second novel and his most direct social argument. Oliver’s journey from the workhouse through the criminal underworld of Victorian London is a sustained attack on the Poor Law of 1834 and on the conditions that made criminal exploitation of children inevitable. The characters — Fagin, Bill Sikes, the Artful Dodger — are Dickens’s most stylised, almost mythological figures. The novel is melodramatic in a way that his later work is not; its power is the power of anger rather than the power of complexity.

The Autobiographical Novel: David Copperfield (1849–50)

Dickens’s own favourite among his novels — the most autobiographical of his works, drawing on his childhood experience of poverty, the blacking factory, and his own romantic failures. David’s first-person narration (a technique Dickens doesn’t use elsewhere) gives the novel a warmth and intimacy that compensates for its length (about 900 pages). The cast of characters is enormous: Agnes Wickfield, the ideally good woman; Dora Spenlow, the ideally unsuitable wife; Uriah Heep, the most thoroughly unpleasant character in Dickens; Micawber, whose financial optimism was based on Dickens’s own father. The richest of Dickens’s novels after Bleak House; the one most frequently cited as his overall favourite by readers who have read widely in his work.

The Mature Masterpiece

Dickens’s two acknowledged masterpieces — Bleak House (1852–53) and Little Dorrit (1855–57) — are not in the collection, but they represent the peak of his achievement. Bleak House (the Chancery lawsuit that destroys everyone it touches, with the most complex plot in Victorian fiction) and Little Dorrit (the Marshalsea debtor’s prison, bureaucracy, and the relationship between poverty and freedom) are recommended for readers who have already enjoyed two or three of the novels above. They are longer and denser than the entry points but reward investment with a completeness that the earlier novels do not quite achieve.