5 Great Reads by Charles Dickens

During his lifetime, Charles Dickens wrote fifteen novels and hundreds of short stories, gave rousing lecture tours, and became the most famous man of his day. Here, we will take a closer look at some of his best works, which won him celebrity status during his lifetime, as well as lasting literary acclaim.

A Christmas Carol is a novella first published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843 that tells the story of the miserly, misanthropic moneylender Ebenezer Scrooge. In the space of one night—the night before Christmas, to be precise—he is haunted by the ghost of his late business partner, Jacob Marley, and then by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come.

By learning the error of his ways and the true spirit of Christmas, Scrooge is redeemed, becoming “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world.” And, in embarking on Scrooge’s spiritual awakening with him, we learn of the factors that have shaped him into the man he was at the beginning of the novella.

While the reader may be encouraged to sympathize with Scrooge to an extent, it has also been observed that Dickens employs various antisemitic tropes in his portrayal of Scrooge, much as he does in his novel Oliver Twist through the character of Fagin. It should be noted that Dickens also demonstrated racist attitudes towards Indians, Black Americans, and Native Americans throughout his writings.

Upon its initial publication on December 19, 1843, A Christmas Carol was a runaway hit, selling out its first edition by Christmas Eve. Within a year, thirteen further editions had been printed. In 1849, Dickens began giving public readings of the novella, which, again, were so popular that he went on to give a further 127 such performances, the last of which took place in 1870, the year of his death. Since its first publication, A Christmas Carol has never been out of place and has been adapted on numerous occasions for screen, stage, and other media.

Drawing on aspects of his own life—it is no coincidence that David Copperfield’s initials are a transposition of those of his author—David Copperfield tells the story of the eponymous protagonist as he grows from a blighted childhood to embark on a career as a novelist. By fictionalizing his own experiences as a child working in a factory, Dickens is able to explore contemporary social issues such as child labor and exploitation and the state of education in the novel that he himself described as his “favourite child.”

Writing David Copperfield was, arguably, something of a new creative venture for Dickens—and one that came off remarkably well. Unlike his previous novels, for which he tended to create outlines prior to writing, Dickens had no set plan in writing David Copperfield: though certain key aspects, such as Agnes’ role and David meeting his aunt, Betsy Trotswood, had been decided on, other aspects, including the profession David will go on to pursue and the ultimate fate of Dora, were only determined during the writing process.

In other ways, however, David Copperfield bears many of the standard stylistic hallmarks of Dickens’ writing, combining elements of the melodramatic, his comic use of names, and his penchant for caricature over more psychologically realistic characterization. Writing at the time of its publication, the Scottish writer Margaret Oliphant, for example, described David Copperfield as “the culmination of Dickens’s early comic fiction.” Today, it is often held to be Dickens’ masterpiece.

3. Bleak House (1852-53)

Arguably Dickens’ most narratively audacious novel, Bleak House, was first published serially between March 1852 and September 1853. It features a sizable cast of characters and multiple intersecting subplots. At the center of the novel is the long-running (long-running, that is, ad absurdum) Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, which is being tried at the Court of Chancery after a testator leaves multiple conflicting wills.

Lady Honoria Dedlock, wife of Sir Leicester Dedlock, stands as a beneficiary under one of these wills. During a reading of an affidavit by the lawyer Mr Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock is apparently so perturbed after catching sight of the handwriting on the copy that she nearly collapses. This prompts Tulkinghorn to investigate the matter further, thus setting in motion one of the novel’s mysteries.

Another mystery explored in the novel is that of Esther Summerson’s parentage. Raised by Miss Barbary, all Esther is told of her mother is that she is her “disgrace, as you were hers.” Following Miss Barbary’s death, the kindlier John Jarndyce becomes Esther’s legal guardian, and after finishing her education, she moves in with her guardian at Bleak House.

Bleak House’s unique narrative structure and masterfully complex plot make it virtually impossible to categorize. Alongside exploring the entangled lives of these two women, the novel is also a murder mystery and an exploration of social mobility, class, justice, guilt, and the possibility of redemption through love.

Hard Times—or, to give it its full title, Hard Times: For These Times—is Dickens’ tenth and shortest novel, first published in 1854. Aside from its notable brevity, Hard Times is also distinguished from Dickens’ other novels by virtue of its lack of illustrations, as well as the fact that it features no scenes set in London. Instead, the novel takes place in Coketown, a fictional, generalized portrayal of an industrial Northern mill town in the nineteenth century.

The novel’s tripartite structure opens with a classroom scene where Mr Gradgrind espouses the value of facts—rather than imaginative freedom—in the education of children. His strict pedagogical methods are reflected in his methods of bringing up his own children. The novel traces the devastating effects such an upbringing has on Gradgrind’s two eldest children, Louise and Tom, the first of whom is emotionally repressed and trapped in a loveless marriage, while Tom goes on to pursue a life of crime.

Alongside the fate of the Gradgrind family, the novel also focuses on the struggles of a mill worker named Stephen Blackpool, who is employed by Josiah Bounderby, Louise’s (much older) husband. Married to an alcoholic whom he longs to divorce so that he can marry his friend Rachel, Blackpool is ostracized by his community of fellow mill workers when he refuses to join the union. After being unfairly sacked by Bounderby, his reputation suffers further damage.

Hard Times was published serially in Dickens’ weekly publication, Household Words, between April 1 and August 12, 1854, partly to boost the periodical’s sales. Between 1854 and 1855, Household Words also published Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South, which also explores trade unionism, though arguably from a much more sympathetic and nuanced perspective than that of Dickens’ Hard Times.

Perhaps Dickens’ best-known work, Great Expectations, is a novel first published in serial form from December 1860 to August 1861 in Dickens’ own weekly periodical All the Year Round. Divided into three sections, the story, narrated in the first person, is a bildungsroman focusing on the life of Philip “Pip” Pirrip. At the novel’s start, Pip is a young orphan, living with his sister and her husband, a kind blacksmith named Joe, in the Kent marshes. After a series of strange and rather troubling encounters with an escaped convict, as well as an aging jilted bride—Miss Havisham—and her adopted daughter Estella, he grows up and begins his apprenticeship with Joe, only to learn from Mr Jaggers, a lawyer, that he has been furnished with an income from an anonymous patron.

Now that he is a gentleman, Pip is now of the same social standing as Estella, with whom he is in love. He moves to London, where, despite his newfound fortune, he soon gets into debt, and Estella seems to be more outside his reach than ever before. Meanwhile, his status as a gentleman alienates him from the people he once loved, including Joe. When he discovers the true origin of his fortune, and his debt catches up with him, however, he is forced to reevaluate his former great expectations.

Charles Dickens is widely considered to be one of the best—if not the best—novelists of the Victorian era. In his lifetime, his writing won him fame and fortune. Indeed, there is an argument to be made for Dickens being the first writer to achieve international stardom. Now, more than 150 years after his death, his legacy as a titan of English literary history is assured by these and his many other great works of fiction.