Author Guide · Victorian Fiction
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In 1824, when his father was sent to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, twelve-year-old Charles Dickens left school and worked ten-hour days pasting labels on pots of boot blacking for six shillings a week. Twelve years later he was writing The Pickwick Papers in monthly shilling parts; sales fell to about 400 copies by the third number and were close to 40,000 by the end. For the rest of his life he wrote novels the same way, in instalments, while editing two weekly magazines and, from 1858, giving public readings in Britain and America. He published fifteen novels, the last left half-finished when he died in 1870, and five Christmas books, the first of which, A Christmas Carol, has never been out of print. This guide covers his 15 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 15 key books · 1836–1870 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Charles Dickens wrote 15 novels, from The Pickwick Papers (1836) to the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), and five Christmas books, including A Christmas Carol (1843). His best-known novels are Oliver Twist (1837), David Copperfield (1849), Bleak House (1852), A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860). Start with Great Expectations, or with A Christmas Carol if you want to try him in an evening. Years below are the year each novel began to appear in parts.
Where to Start with Charles Dickens
If you want the best first novel
→ Great Expectations (1860) — his tightest plot, told by Pip in the first person; try A Christmas Carol first if you want something shorter still.
If you want the book he loved most
→ David Copperfield (1849) — the most autobiographical of his novels.
If you want a historical thriller
→ A Tale of Two Cities (1859) — London and Paris in the French Revolution, and one of his shortest novels.
If you want him at his most ambitious
→ Bleak House (1852) — the fog, the lawsuit and the whole of London society.
15 Charles Dickens Novels, in Order
The Pickwick Papers
Issued in monthly parts from April 1836 to November 1837 (in one volume in 1837). It began as text to accompany sporting illustrations by Robert Seymour, who died after the first numbers; Dickens turned it into the travels of Samuel Pickwick and his club. Sales were around 400 copies a number until Pickwick’s servant Sam Weller arrived, and close to 40,000 by the last.
Oliver Twist
Serialised monthly in Bentley’s Miscellany from February 1837 to April 1839. A workhouse orphan who asks for more runs away to London and falls in with Fagin’s gang of child pickpockets, the Artful Dodger, Bill Sikes and Nancy. Its portrait of Fagin, repeatedly called “the Jew”, has been criticised as antisemitic, and Dickens cut many of those references from later editions.
Nicholas Nickleby
Monthly parts from April 1838 to October 1839. Left penniless, young Nicholas becomes an assistant master at Dotheboys Hall, a brutal Yorkshire school run by Wackford Squeers, then joins a travelling theatre company while his uncle Ralph schemes against the family. Dickens wrote it after visiting cheap Yorkshire boarding schools in early 1838.
The Old Curiosity Shop
Weekly in Dickens’s own magazine Master Humphrey’s Clock, April 1840 to February 1841. Little Nell and her gambling grandfather flee London and the moneylender Daniel Quilp and wander the English Midlands. The death of Nell made it one of the most popular, and most mocked, books of the century.
Barnaby Rudge
Weekly in Master Humphrey’s Clock, February to November 1841. The first of his two historical novels, set around the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots that tore through London in 1780, with Barnaby, a simple young man, and his raven Grip caught up in the violence.
Martin Chuzzlewit
Monthly parts from the end of 1842 (the first number dated January 1843) to July 1844. A satire on selfishness in the greedy Chuzzlewit family, with the hypocrite Pecksniff and the nurse Sarah Gamp. Written after his first American tour in 1842, it sends young Martin to the United States, a section American readers resented.
Dombey and Son
Monthly parts from October 1846 to April 1848. The proud merchant Paul Dombey wants only a son to carry on the firm; when his sickly boy dies, he is left with the daughter he has always ignored, Florence. The new railways cutting through London run through the book, and it is often read as the start of his mature work.
David Copperfield
Monthly parts from May 1849 to November 1850. David tells his own life, from a cruel stepfather and work in a London warehouse to marriage and success as a writer, with Mr Micawber, Betsey Trotwood and Uriah Heep along the way. It draws closely on Dickens’s own childhood, and in a later preface he called it his “favourite child”.
Bleak House
Monthly parts from March 1852 to September 1853. Built around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an inheritance case that has dragged on in the Court of Chancery for generations, it alternates a third-person narrator in the present tense with the first-person story of Esther Summerson. It also has one of the first detectives in English fiction, Inspector Bucket.
Hard Times
Weekly in Household Words, April to August 1854, and his shortest novel. In the northern mill town of Coketown, the schoolmaster and MP Thomas Gradgrind raises his children on “Facts” alone, with consequences for both. Dickens dedicated it to Thomas Carlyle.
Little Dorrit
Monthly parts from December 1855 to June 1857. Amy Dorrit was born in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, where her father has lived for over twenty years — the prison where Dickens’s own father was held in 1824. It also satirises government through the Circumlocution Office, whose purpose is to get nothing done.
A Tale of Two Cities
Weekly in All the Year Round, the new magazine it launched, from 30 April to 26 November 1859. Set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, it follows Lucie Manette, her father, who was a prisoner in the Bastille, the French aristocrat Charles Darnay and the dissolute lawyer Sydney Carton. It opens with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”.
Great Expectations
Weekly in All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861. The orphan Pip helps an escaped convict on the Kent marshes, is taken up by the jilted Miss Havisham and her ward Estella, and then receives money from an unknown benefactor to become a gentleman in London. Dickens changed the ending after the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton read the first version.
Our Mutual Friend
Monthly parts from May 1864 to November 1865, and his last completed novel. It begins with a body pulled from the Thames, believed to be John Harmon, heir to a fortune made from London’s rubbish heaps. Dickens had the manuscript with him in the Staplehurst rail crash of June 1865 and went back into the carriage for it.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Planned in twelve monthly numbers; Dickens died in June 1870 with half of it written, and the six completed numbers appeared from April to September 1870. In the cathedral town of Cloisterham, the choirmaster John Jasper, a secret opium user, is obsessed with his nephew Edwin’s fiancée, and Edwin disappears. Who did it, and how it would end, is still argued over.
In What Order to Read Charles Dickens
None of the novels continue from one to another, so you can read in any order. Publication order shows how he changed: the early books are loose, comic and episodic, written number by number with little planning, while from Dombey and Son (1846) on he planned each novel in advance and the books grow darker and more tightly built, ending with the London-wide Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend.
A practical order for a first-time reader is to start short: A Christmas Carol (1843) in an evening, then Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities, which were written as weekly serials and move faster than the long monthly novels. Then go to David Copperfield and Bleak House. Leave Edwin Drood until last: it stops mid-story.
A reading path
1. A Christmas Carol (1843)
2. Great Expectations (1860)
3. A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
4. David Copperfield (1849)
5. Bleak House (1852)
6. Our Mutual Friend (1864)
Everything Else Charles Dickens Published
Beyond the 15 key books: 16 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Christmas books
5
5 books · 1843–1848
- 1843A Christmas CarolScrooge and the three spirits; published on 19 December 1843, its first 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve
- 1844The Chimesa poor ticket-porter and the church bells, on New Year’s Eve
- 1845The Cricket on the Heartha carrier’s household and a jealous misunderstanding
- 1846The Battle of Lifetwo sisters and a sacrifice, set on an old battlefield
- 1848The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargaina chemist who asks a spirit to take away his memories
Travel writing and nonfiction
6
6 books · 1838–1934
- 1838Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldithe clown’s memoirs, edited by Dickens
- 1842American Notes for General Circulationhis first trip to the United States and Canada
- 1846Pictures from Italya year living in Genoa and travelling through Italy
- 1851A Child’s History of Englandserialised in Household Words, 1851–53
- 1860The Uncommercial Travelleressays and walks first printed in All the Year Round
- 1934The Life of Our Lordwritten for his children in 1846–49, published long after his death
Short fiction and sketches
5
5 books · 1836–1868
- 1836Sketches by Bozhis first book: London scenes and characters first printed in newspapers and magazines
- 1838Sketches of Young Gentlemencomic character sketches
- 1840Master Humphrey’s Clockthe weekly frame for The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge
- 1867No Thoroughfarea Christmas story written with Wilkie Collins
- 1868Christmas Storiesthe stories from his magazines’ Christmas numbers, including “The Signal-Man”
The years · 1812–1870
Quick facts about Charles Dickens
- Known for
- He is known for comic and furious novels of Victorian London, written in monthly and weekly instalments, that made characters such as Scrooge, Fagin and Miss Havisham household names.
- 1812
- Born in Landport, Portsmouth
- 1824
- Works in a blacking warehouse aged 12
- 1836
- The Pickwick Papers begins
- 1843
- A Christmas Carol
- 1870
- Dies at Gads Hill, Kent, aged 58
- Born
- 7 February 1812, Landport, Portsmouth
- Childhood
- Worked in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse at 12 while his father was in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison
- Married
- Catherine Hogarth in 1836; ten children; separated in 1858
- Editor
- Household Words (1850–59) and All the Year Round (1859–70)
- Public readings
- From 1858; 76 readings on his second American tour, 1867–68
- Died
- 9 June 1870, Gads Hill Place, Higham, Kent; buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey
The red mark is 1849: David Copperfield, the novel he called his “favourite child”.
How Charles Dickens Writes: Novels in Instalments
Almost everything Dickens wrote came out in parts before it became a book: most novels in monthly shilling numbers, the last a double number, and five (The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations) in weekly magazines. He usually wrote only a few numbers ahead of the printer and changed course when sales moved, which is how Sam Weller took over Pickwick. The form explains the cliffhangers, the large casts and the recurring catchphrases that let readers keep track from month to month.
He builds people from a few fixed details — a phrase, a gesture, a name — and exaggerates them: Uriah Heep’s “umble”, Micawber waiting for something to “turn up”, Miss Havisham still in her wedding dress. Around them he sets real institutions he wanted changed, from the workhouses of Oliver Twist and the Yorkshire schools of Nicholas Nickleby to Chancery in Bleak House and debtors’ prisons in Little Dorrit.
The books were also written to be heard. Families read the numbers aloud, and from 1858 Dickens performed his own scenes on stage, from Scrooge to the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist, until a stroke stopped his farewell tour in 1869. For writers who share his range of characters, social anger and comedy, see Authors like Charles Dickens.
Frequently asked questions about Charles Dickens’ books
Who was Charles Dickens?
The most popular English novelist of the Victorian era, born in 1812 and died in 1870. At twelve he left school to work ten-hour days in a boot-blacking factory while his father was held in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, an experience he returned to in David Copperfield and Little Dorrit. He became a journalist, found fame with The Pickwick Papers (1836) and went on to write fifteen novels, edit magazines and give hugely popular public readings.
When and where was Charles Dickens born?
On 7 February 1812, at 1 Mile End Terrace in Landport, Portsea, part of Portsmouth in Hampshire. The house is now the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum.
How and when did Charles Dickens die?
He had a stroke at Gad’s Hill Place, his home at Higham in Kent, on 8 June 1870, after a full day’s work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and died there the next day, 9 June 1870, aged 58. He was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Who wrote A Christmas Carol?
Charles Dickens. He wrote it in a few weeks in the autumn of 1843 and it was published on 19 December 1843, the first of his five Christmas books. Ebenezer Scrooge, the three spirits and Tiny Tim made it his best-known and most-adapted work.
Who wrote Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities?
All three are by Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist appeared in 1837–39, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris during the French Revolution, in 1859, and Great Expectations, narrated by the orphan Pip, in 1860–61.
Can I read A Christmas Carol online for free?
Yes. Dickens’s books are in the public domain, so A Christmas Carol and his other novels can be read free online, for example on Project Gutenberg, which has several editions of it. Annotated paperback editions are worth buying if you want notes on the Victorian background.
How many books did Charles Dickens write?
Fifteen novels, the last of them, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished at his death in 1870, and five Christmas books, starting with A Christmas Carol (1843). He also published travel writing, a history of England for children and collections of sketches and stories: eleven further volumes are listed on this page, alongside hundreds of articles for his magazines.
What are Charles Dickens’ books in order?
By the year each began to appear: The Pickwick Papers (1836), Oliver Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), Dombey and Son (1846), David Copperfield (1849), Bleak House (1852), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860), Our Mutual Friend (1864) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Most were serialised over one to two years, so book editions often carry the following year.
Which Dickens novel should I read first?
Great Expectations: it is one of his shorter novels, has a tight plot and is narrated by Pip, which makes it easier to follow than the many-stranded monthly novels. If you want to try him in a single sitting first, read the novella A Christmas Carol.
What is Charles Dickens’ most famous book?
A Christmas Carol (1843), the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, is his best-known work and the most often adapted. Among the novels, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are the most widely read.
Was Dickens paid by the word?
No. That is a myth. He was paid by the instalment: for The Pickwick Papers, Chapman and Hall offered nine guineas a printed sheet of sixteen pages, with one and a half sheets in each monthly number, so about fourteen guineas a number at the start. Each monthly part had to fill a set number of pages (32 from the third Pickwick number on), not a set number of words.
Did Dickens finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood?
No. It was planned in twelve monthly numbers; he died on 9 June 1870, the day after a stroke, with half of it written, and six numbers were published. He left no plan for the solution, so whether Edwin Drood was murdered, and by whom, remains open; many writers have since attempted endings.
Was Fagin in Oliver Twist an antisemitic portrayal?
Fagin is drawn from antisemitic stereotypes and is called “the Jew” throughout the first edition. In 1863 Eliza Davis, a Jewish reader, wrote to Dickens objecting; he defended the character at first, but later editions cut many of those references, and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) includes Riah, a sympathetic Jewish character, often read as his answer.
What happened in Charles Dickens’ marriage?
He married Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and they had ten children. In 1858 they separated; Dickens publicly blamed her, and from about 1857 until his death he had a relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan. Letters by Catherine’s neighbour Edward Dutton Cook, analysed by the scholar John Bowen in 2019, say Dickens also tried to have her committed to an asylum, an attempt that failed.
Which Dickens books have been made into films?
Nearly all of them. Well-known versions include David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), the musical Oliver! (film 1968) and The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992). His novels are also retold in new fiction: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which moves David Copperfield to Appalachia, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023.
Was Charles Dickens a Christian?
Yes. He was baptised and buried in the Church of England and is generally regarded as a professing Christian, though he disliked religious dogma, and in the early 1840s he showed an interest in Unitarian Christianity. In 1846 he wrote The Life of Our Lord, a retelling of the life of Jesus for his own children, which was not published until 1934.
Did Charles Dickens drink and smoke?
He drank, but moderately by the standards of his time. He loved punch, which he liked to mix himself, called a gin punch “the most wonderful beverage in the world”, and switched to whisky in later life; cigars are mentioned among his pleasures. Drink runs through his fiction, from the punch in The Pickwick Papers to the “smoking bishop” at the end of A Christmas Carol.
Does “what the dickens” come from Charles Dickens?
No. The phrase is more than two centuries older than him: in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor Mrs Page says “I cannot tell what the dickens his name is”. “Dickens” there is a polite stand-in for “devil”.
Footnotes
- Charles Dickens — Wikipedia
- Charles Dickens bibliography — Wikipedia
- Was Dickens really paid by the word? — The Dickens Project, UC Santa Cruz
- The story behind The Pickwick Papers — Wordsworth Editions
- A Tale of Two Publishings — Library of Congress blog, 2015
- Dickens letters and the asylum — University of York, 2019
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.”
— Charles Dickens, preface to the Charles Dickens Edition of David Copperfield (1869)
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