Top 10 Unputdownable Charles Dickens Novels Everyone Should Read

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

The most famous opening in English literature, and rightly so.

My mother was a huge Dickens fan, and she set me off on what she considered to be his easiest novel to read — A Tale of Two Cities — which of course is a masterpiece of storytelling. My wife Mary will tell you that is exactly what it is — a masterpiece of storytelling. She will also tell you, in the next breath, that Bleak House is a masterpiece, full stop. We have agreed to disagree on the point for forty years, and I do not expect to settle it in the lifetime of this article.

Dickens tells the story of the French Revolution through the lives of two men — Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat trying to escape his family’s crimes, and Sydney Carton, a dissolute English lawyer who happens to look exactly like him. They both love the same woman. One of them will take the other’s place at the guillotine.

I loved the idea of a man sacrificing his life to allow his friend to marry the woman they both loved. Very simple theme. But not simple when handled by the genius of Charles Dickens.

It is the easiest book to read. It is a very short book compared with, say, Bleak House or Great Expectations. And it is unusual in the sense that it is a very straightforward story. It has a beginning, a middle and an end in a very straightforward way. Whenever a list is compiled of the twenty greatest novels ever written, A Tale of Two Cities tends to come top. More people have read it than have read any other book. I have no objection to it being number one, because of the Dickens books, it is my favourite.

The sacrifice at the end of this novel is the greatest ending in fiction. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…” Read those last four pages aloud and try not to weep. I defy you.

I have used Sydney Carton as a mental yardstick all my writing life. When I build a character, I ask: could he or she walk up those steps? If the answer is yes, I have the makings of a novel. If no, I have not yet done the work.

Pip. Miss Havisham. Estella. Magwitch. The marshes, the convict, the stopped clocks, the rotting wedding cake.

No novel contains more iconic images than Great Expectations, and no novel asks a more important question: what happens to a boy who is given money he did not earn, by a benefactor he does not know? The answer, Dickens says quietly, is that he becomes a snob. And then — this is the novel’s gift — he learns, painfully and honestly, to become a man.

Miss Havisham is the finest portrait of wounded pride in English fiction. She has been jilted on her wedding morning, stopped the clocks, left the cake to rot, and raised her adopted daughter to break the heart of every man who approaches her. She is not a villain. She is a tragedy. Every writer who attempts a great female antagonist — and I have attempted a few — is, whether they know it or not, measuring themselves against Miss Havisham.

This is the sad Dickens. Most readers do not know it as a sad novel — because it is also the Dickens novel with the most-debated ending of his entire career. He wrote two. The first was bleak, true to the novel and true to his characters. His friend Bulwer-Lytton talked him out of it, and the version we now read is the second, gentler one. I prefer the first.

Why? Because it is harder to write an unhappy ending and keep the reader satisfied than to write a happy one — far harder. Most novelists, when they reach the end of a sad story, give the reader a small kindness in the closing pages: a reconciliation, a marriage, a redemption. Dickens, in his second ending, did exactly that. It is beautifully done. But the first ending was the braver one, and bravery, in fiction, is the thing I look for.

I love Great Expectations. I return to it more often than any Dickens reader would tell you they do. But when critics and storytellers argue about Dickens’s masterpiece, they do not land on Pip. They land on Bleak House, and I am with them. As is Mary.

Bleak House is the masterpiece. Unquestionable. I have said so for years. My wife Mary, who knows Dickens better than I do, has been saying so for longer.

It is not just our opinion. Serious critics of Dickens — the real ones, the ones who do not need to be polite — have settled on Bleak House as the finest thing he ever wrote. It is an industrial marvel of a novel: a fog-bound Chancery court, a fifty-year lawsuit that has outlived its claimants, a detective (the first in English fiction — Inspector Bucket), a heroine with a disfigured face, a lawyer who is the finest portrait of a decent man in all of Dickens, and perhaps thirty other characters you will remember for the rest of your life.

The heroine is Esther Summerson. She was better than a housekeeper — she was extremely bright. She narrates half the book, with a modesty that makes her impossible not to love. The emotional core, for me, is her love story — she loves a man she is not permitted to marry, and agrees instead to marry someone else who knows she is not in love with him. It is tragic at one level, and — because this is Dickens — it all works out in the end, because it always does with Dickens. I found the resolution genuinely moving.

The character I love most is John Jarndyce. He is one of the best characters in all of Dickens. He is what everybody thinks a lawyer is. Wise, kind, self-effacing, and good — which, as any writer will tell you, is the hardest thing to write. Like Shakespeare, Dickens’s minor characters are memorable; Jarndyce is the minor character who walks away with the whole novel.

A confession: Bleak House is seven or eight hundred pages. It would never work today. But if Dickens were alive today — and he was clever and talented enough that he would have adapted — Bleak House would be 450 pages, and it would still be a masterpiece. The genius did not depend on the length. The genius found the length the era allowed.

I was a young MP when I first read Bleak House, and it left me with a lasting suspicion of anything that calls itself a “system.” Systems, in Dickens, are what crush individual people while pretending to help them. It is a lesson every legislator, banker and lawyer ought to be forced to re-learn annually.

And here again, the BBC did a remarkable adaptation. So once you have read the book, enjoy the TV courtesy of BBC iPlayer. The storytelling is truly wonderful. I have watched it three times now.

Dickens’s own favourite of his novels. “Of all my books,” he wrote, “I like this the best.” I tend to trust writers on their favourites — and I know exactly why he picked this one. He picked it because he was writing about himself.

Copperfield is the most autobiographical of the novels. The blacking-factory scenes are not invented; they are remembered. The cruel stepfather is not invented; he is, more or less, Dickens’s own. The boy who escapes to London and finds his voice is the boy Dickens was. Most autobiographical novels fail because the author’s life is not interesting enough to carry a story. Dickens’s life was interesting enough to carry six. Copperfield is the one in which he gives us the truth.

What makes the book great, beyond the autobiography, is Mr Micawber. Every literary-minded person I know has, at some point in their life, been Mr Micawber — permanently expecting something to turn up, permanently broke, permanently cheerful. I certainly was, for the five years it took me to clear my debts after Aquablast. There are worse models than Micawber for getting through the dark years.

With Dickens, you could almost pick any major character from any book; each one is a work of genius.

I settled on Oliver Twist because of the sheer number of incredible characters. You’ve got Fagin, Bill Sikes, Mr Bumble, Nancy. And I chose the Dodger simply because of how he leaps off the page; his language, his movements. Lord knows how many versions have been made for film, stage and TV, but they have to keep on making ’em because it’s so damn good. Dickens is a hero to all storytellers!

This is the book that made Dickens.

You have to understand the mechanics. Nobody read Pickwick as a book. It was in a magazine. Dickens published it in instalments. Every month, a new episode. And everybody followed Pickwick. Pickwick was a great hero. Everybody followed Pickwick and whatever he was doing that month. Only after the magazine run was complete did Dickens realise he could put it together as a book — and when he did, the book sold on a scale Victorian publishing had never seen.

He was twenty-four. He had been a parliamentary reporter. He was, to be blunt about it, broke. And he wrote himself out of obscurity, chapter by chapter, on monthly deadlines, because he had worked out — quicker than anyone else — how readers wanted stories delivered. He was cunning. He was cunning, and brilliant, and he was way ahead of his time.

I was thirty-four when I wrote Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, in not dissimilar circumstances — broke, frightened, and certain that a first novel was the only way out. Dickens at twenty-four got there faster than I did. But I understood something about him — about what desperation can produce in a writer — that I do not think I could have understood from outside. Pickwick was the book that proved a first novel could change a man’s life. He was not the last author to prove it.

Pickwick itself is a pleasure to read — ridiculous, warm, episodic, full of the kind of characters (Sam Weller, Mr Jingle, Mrs Bardell) who stay in your head for a lifetime. Read it not as a masterpiece but as the young Dickens cracking his knuckles. He got better. But he never got funnier.

If you have read Dickens before but not Pickwick, go back and meet the novel that started everything. It is funnier than you think.

A young hero, a wicked uncle, a cruel schoolmaster, a beautiful heroine, a kindly patron, and a theatrical troupe. If it sounds like every Dickens novel compressed into one, that is because it rather is — but it works.

What I love about Nickleby is Wackford Squeers and the Yorkshire boarding school, Dotheboys Hall. Dickens had seen these places — schools where unwanted children were warehoused, fed poorly, and sometimes worked to death. His portrait of Squeers helped close them down. Entire schools shut within a decade of the novel’s publication. Tell me literature does not change anything.

The novel about debt, prison and family. Dickens’s own father had been imprisoned for debt when Dickens was a child — a trauma he carried for life — and Little Dorrit is the book in which he finally metabolises it.

Amy Dorrit, born inside the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, is one of Dickens’s quietest heroines. She is not clever. She is not beautiful. She is not funny. What she is, is good — steadily, reliably good, through every misfortune. That is surprisingly hard to write. Most writers, myself included, find villains easier. Dickens wrote this novel to prove that goodness could still drive a plot, and he pulled it off.

If you have ever been in financial trouble — and I write this as someone who has — you will recognise every page of Little Dorrit. The shame. The silence. The way a family changes when the money goes. Dickens knew.

And a few words on the BBC adaptation — amazing, unmissable, a masterpiece. Read the book and then watch it on BBC iPlayer.

Strictly speaking, it is a novella, not a novel. Strictly speaking, it should not be on this list. But if I left it off, every reader would tell me I was mad — and every reader would be right.

A Christmas Carol was never meant to be a book. It was always meant to be a pamphlet at Christmas. The great man himself said he tackled it more as something to do than intending to be a novel — and it turned out to be bigger than he had expected.

It is a wonderful story, of course, about how a wicked old thing called Scrooge won’t let Bob Cratchitt stop his work – hold your breath – on Boxing Day. None of this Friday-to-Monday only with some time off; he makes him work the whole time – he’s even reluctant to give him Christmas Day off.

And of course, the show is stolen by Tiny Tim, the son of the Bob Cratchitt – who is made to work on Boxing Day, and who is in a dreadful state.

Scrooge gets visited by three ghosts — the past, the present, and the future. When the past comes, he doesn’t give a damn. When the present comes, he just about survives. But when he sees what is going to happen to him in the future, he changes overnight.

I think I read A Christmas Carol when I was about sixteen. It was one of my mother’s favourites. My mother was a great reader; Lola, our housekeeper, was a great reader; there were always books in the house, and Christmas Carolwas one of the first grown-up books either of them pressed on me. I have re-read it most Decembers since, and I can recommend the habit.

Scrooge, three ghosts, Tiny Tim, “God bless us, every one.” You know the plot. What Dickens is doing — and the critics are right to flag it — is extreme. Very few people on earth are as bad as Ebenezer Scrooge. And nobody is as nice as Tiny Tim. The critics of Dickens have always complained that he is too romantic. But — and I say this as a storyteller — who cares? His bad is a bad, and his good is a good, and the book works. It has gone on working for a hundred and eighty years. That is not sentimentality. That is craft disguised as sentimentality, which is the hardest disguise of all.

Dickens wrote it in six weeks. He published it at his own expense because his publisher thought it would not sell. He more or less invented the modern Christmas in doing so. Our sense of what Christmas should feel like — family, generosity, forgiveness, the redemption of the hard of heart — is substantially Dickens’s invention.

I have a first edition of A Christmas Carol — the 1843 issue with the John Leech hand-coloured illustrations Dickens commissioned at his own expense. The book all but ruined his publisher and made his name. I look at it often.

It is a lovely Christmas story by one of the greatest storytellers that has ever lived.

Read it every December. I do.

Dickens’s last completed novel, and the one I think is underrated.

A young man is presumed drowned. A rubbish-heap in London turns out to contain a fortune. A lawyer, a boatman, a schoolmaster, and a dozen other characters are drawn into a plot about money, class, identity, and what it means to appear dead. It is darker than the early Dickens. It is funnier than people remember. And the river runs through it like a character of its own.

T.S. Eliot adored this book. Henry James borrowed from it. Modern novelists keep rediscovering it. If you have read the famous Dickens novels and thought you had finished, pick up Our Mutual Friend. He kept getting better.