Reading List

Authors Like Charles Dickens

When Dickens was twelve his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea and the boy was sent to paste labels on bottles in a blacking warehouse by the Thames. He told almost nobody about it for the rest of his life, and then put it into David Copperfield and spent fifteen novels writing about children the system had decided not to see. The books were published in monthly or weekly parts, which is why they are enormous, densely plotted and full of people who vanish for two hundred pages and reappear exactly when the plot requires them: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend. He also edited magazines, campaigned on sanitation and schooling, and gave public readings that drew enormous crowds and wrecked his health. He was working on The Mystery of Edwin Drood when he died in 1870, and it has never been finished. He is unusually visible this year: a four-part A Tale of Two Cities is running on BBC One and MGM+ with Kit Harington, a three-part BBC documentary is coming for the National Year of Reading, and a new Christmas Carol film arrives in November. The ten below are chosen on plot, on anger and on what they do with the poor.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Victorian fiction · Fifteen novels · Serialised monthly · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

The closest match is his own friend and collaborator Wilkie Collins, who worked the same serialised form and plotted even tighter. Among the Victorians, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the industrial poverty Dickens campaigned about, Anthony Trollope the institutions and George Eliot the interior lives he skips. Victor Hugo is the European equivalent at the same scale. Three living writers carry the inheritance directly. And one Victorian wrote the same country with none of the rescue.

Every book by Charles Dickens →

Where to start if you loved Charles Dickens

If you want the closest match, read Wilkie Collins.

The Woman in White. A woman in white on a midnight road, and six hundred pages that fly.

If you loved Hard Times, read Elizabeth Gaskell.

North and South. The same mill towns, with the workers given arguments instead of pathos.

If you want the same scale in French, read Victor Hugo.

Les Misérables. Nineteen years for a stolen loaf, and everything that follows.

If you want the Victorian novel written now, read Sarah Waters.

Fingersmith. London thieves in the 1860s, and a plot that turns over twice.

If you want the argument against him, read Thomas Hardy.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The same century, with nobody coming to help.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

10 authors like Charles Dickens

01
His friend, and the tighter plotter · Closest match

Wilkie Collins

British · The Woman in White (1859), The Moonstone (1868)

Collins was Dickens's close friend, frequent collaborator and fellow contributor to his magazines, and The Woman in White was serialised in All the Year Round directly after A Tale of Two Cities. It opens with a man meeting a woman dressed entirely in white on a road outside London at midnight, and turns into a story of stolen identity, asylum confinement and a conspiracy over an inheritance. The Moonstone is generally called the first English detective novel. He lived unconventionally, maintaining two households, and took laudanum for years for a painful condition.

The nearest match, and the one Dickens readers most reliably love next. Same serialised machinery, same appetite for melodrama and disguise, same Victorian London of lawyers and locked rooms — with a plot considerably more tightly engineered than Dickens ever bothered with, because Collins was building mysteries rather than moral arguments. Start with The Woman in White, which is six hundred pages and reads like four hundred.

— Lisanne
02
The industrial north

Elizabeth Gaskell

British · Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1853), North and South (1855)

Gaskell was a minister's wife in Manchester who saw the cotton industry from close range and wrote Mary Barton about a working family in it, including a chapter on a dying child that scandalised readers who preferred not to know. North and South sends a southern clergyman's daughter to a northern mill town and stages the argument between mill owner and striking workers without deciding it in advance. It was serialised in Dickens's own magazine, Household Words, and he edited her with a heavy hand.

What Dickens campaigns about, written by somebody who lived among it. Both are angry about the same conditions; the difference is that Gaskell gives the workers arguments rather than pathos, and lets the employer be intelligent. She is also far better on women's inner lives, which is the standing weakness in Dickens. Read North and South after Hard Times and the contrast is instructive.

— Lisanne
03
The institutions

Anthony Trollope

British · Barchester Towers (1857), The Way We Live Now (1875)

Trollope wrote forty-seven novels while holding a full-time job at the Post Office, where he introduced the pillar box to Britain, writing a fixed number of words every morning before work. The Barsetshire novels follow the clergy of an invented cathedral city; the Palliser novels follow politics. The Way We Live Now is a furious satire on a financial swindler and the London society that will not ask where his money came from.

The other great Victorian chronicler, working the same decades with the opposite method. Dickens gives you a caricature you remember forever; Trollope gives you an ordinary person whose reasoning you can follow all the way into a bad decision. He is also unmatched on how an institution actually behaves — a cathedral chapter, a party, a bank. Read The Way We Live Now if the financial villainy in Little Dorrit was what gripped you.

— Lisanne
04
The interior lives he skips

George Eliot

British · The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871–72)

Mary Ann Evans published as George Eliot, lived openly with a married man for over twenty years, and wrote Middlemarch, a novel about provincial English life in which a clever young woman marries the wrong scholar and a young doctor's ideals are eroded by small debts and small compromises. Virginia Woolf called it one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.

The contemporary who does what Dickens cannot. His characters are unforgettable from the outside — a walk, a phrase, a tic — and hers are unforgettable from the inside, because she follows the reasoning that leads an intelligent person into a mistake. Read both and you have the two halves of the Victorian novel. If you have only ever read Dickens, Middlemarch will feel like a different art form.

— Lisanne
Every book by George Eliot →

Authors like George Eliot →

05
The same scale, in French

Victor Hugo

French · The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), Les Misérables (1862)

Les Misérables runs to some fourteen hundred pages and follows Jean Valjean, imprisoned nineteen years for stealing bread, through decades of pursuit by a policeman who cannot conceive of a reformed criminal, with the Paris uprising of 1832 at its centre and long digressions on the sewers, Waterloo and the slang of thieves. Hugo spent nearly twenty years in exile for opposing Napoleon III, and at his funeral in 1885 two million people lined the streets of Paris.

The European Dickens, and the comparison holds in both directions: enormous plots, orphans and convicts, social outrage delivered through melodrama, and the confidence to stop the story for forty pages to explain something. Hugo is grander and more political; Dickens is funnier and better at a minor character. If you want one nineteenth-century novel that contains everything, this is it.

— Lisanne
06
Older than the genre · The comic ancestor

Henry Fielding

British · Joseph Andrews (1742), Tom Jones (1749)

Tom Jones follows a foundling of unknown parentage across eighteenth-century England, through inns, highwaymen, misunderstandings and a great deal of sex, with a narrator who interrupts constantly to address the reader about what he is doing. Fielding was also a magistrate who helped found the Bow Street Runners, an early London police force, so the underworld in the novel is reported rather than imagined.

The comic novel Dickens inherited, and he said so: a foundling hero, a sprawling journey, minor characters who steal every scene, and a narrator who is openly enjoying himself. What Dickens added was the anger. Fielding finds the eighteenth-century underworld funny; Dickens finds it unforgivable. Read the first hundred pages of Tom Jones and the family resemblance is unmistakable.

— Lisanne
07
The Victorian novel, written now

Sarah Waters

British · Fingersmith (2002), The Night Watch (2006), The Paying Guests (2014)

Fingersmith is set among London thieves in the 1860s: a young pickpocket is placed as a maid to a sheltered heiress in a remote house as part of a plot to defraud her, and the novel turns over completely twice. Waters has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times and holds a doctorate in historical fiction. The Paying Guests moves to 1922 and a widow taking lodgers.

The best living writer of the Victorian novel, and she does something Dickens could not: she puts the people his plots use — servants, thieves, women confined for convenience — at the centre and gives them desires of their own. The asylum material in Fingersmith is a direct answer to The Woman in White. Start here if you want the period with modern nerve.

— Lisanne
08
The inheritance, declared

John Irving

American · The World According to Garp (1978), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), Queen Esther (2025)

Irving has written sixteen novels since 1968, built on orphans, absent fathers, enormous casts and plots engineered so that an early detail pays off four hundred pages later; he writes the last sentence first and works backwards. The Cider House Rules is set in an orphanage and won him an Academy Award for his own screenplay. He has named Dickens as his model for fifty years and reviewers have called him Dickensian in nearly every notice.

The clearest living case of the inheritance, and he is open about it. The orphan at the centre, the vast cast held in place by plot, the willingness to be funny and appalling in the same chapter, and above all the refusal to treat coincidence as beneath a serious novelist. Read The Cider House Rules directly after Oliver Twist.

— Lisanne
Every book by John Irving →

Authors like John Irving →

09
London, crowded, now

Zadie Smith

British · White Teeth (2000), NW (2012), The Fraud (2023)

White Teeth follows two families across north London and several decades, published when Smith was twenty-four. NW takes four people from the same council estate and gives each a different narrative technique. The Fraud is a full Victorian novel set around the real Tichborne trial of the 1870s, in which a butcher from Australia claimed to be a missing aristocratic heir, with a Jamaican former slave as a key witness.

The contemporary novelist working Dickens's actual territory: London as a crowd, class as the engine, comedy and injustice in the same paragraph, and a refusal to write only one kind of person. The Fraud makes the debt explicit — it is a nineteenth-century novel about a court case, and Dickens himself appears in it. Read that one if you want the connection on the page.

— Lisanne
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Authors like Zadie Smith →

10
The argument against him

Thomas Hardy

British · Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895)

Hardy wrote rural Wessex, an invented version of Dorset, across fourteen novels in which the landscape is indifferent and the social machinery is not. Tess follows a young woman destroyed by a rape, a confession and a husband's double standard; Jude the Obscure was attacked so violently on publication — one bishop reportedly burned it — that Hardy stopped writing novels altogether and spent his last thirty years on poetry.

The Victorian England Dickens wrote, with the rescue removed. Dickens believes a benefactor may appear, that a coincidence can save someone, that a cruel man might be reformed by three ghosts; Hardy believes none of it, and his plots turn on the letter that slides under the carpet and is never read. The sentimentality that critics have always held against Dickens is exactly what Hardy refuses. Read Tess and then decide which version of that century you believe.

— Lisanne

Frequently asked questions about authors like Charles Dickens

Who should I read if I love Charles Dickens?

Wilkie Collins is the closest — his friend, his collaborator, and a tighter plotter. Among the Victorians, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote industrial poverty from inside it, Anthony Trollope wrote institutions, George Eliot wrote the interior lives Dickens skips, and Victor Hugo did the same thing at the same scale in French. Henry Fielding wrote the comic novel Dickens inherited. For living writers, Sarah Waters writes the period with modern nerve, John Irving has named Dickens as his model for fifty years, and Zadie Smith works the same crowded London. Thomas Hardy is the argument against.

Which Dickens novel should I start with?

Great Expectations (1861), which is the shortest of the major ones, has the tightest plot and contains Miss Havisham. A Christmas Carol (1843) takes two hours and is better than its thousand adaptations. If you want the one most readers end up loving most, David Copperfield is the most personal and the warmest. Bleak House is the masterpiece and it is nine hundred pages, so come to it third or fourth.

Why are his novels so long?

Because they were sold in parts. Most appeared in monthly instalments of about thirty-two pages, or weekly in his own magazines, over a year or more, with each part ending on a hook to sell the next. That structure explains nearly everything readers notice: the enormous cast, the recaps, the subplots that vanish and return, and the coincidences that tie it all together at the end. He also wrote against the deadline and occasionally changed the plot in response to sales.

What is being adapted this year?

Quite a lot, because 2026 is Britain's National Year of Reading. A four-part A Tale of Two Cities began on BBC One and MGM+ on 6 September 2026, created by Daniel West, with Kit Harington as Sydney Carton, François Civil as Charles Darnay and Mirren Mack as Lucie Manette. The BBC also has a three-part documentary series coming on Dickens as an insomniac night walker of Victorian London. And Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, directed by Ti West with Johnny Depp as Scrooge, is due in cinemas on 13 November 2026.

What is the criticism of Dickens?

Chiefly sentimentality and caricature. His minor characters are unforgettable and largely fixed — a phrase, a gesture, repeated — and his virtuous young women are frequently interchangeable, which even admirers concede. The plots depend on coincidence and on benefactors appearing at the right moment. Henry James called him the greatest of superficial novelists, meaning the surfaces are supreme and the interiors thin. George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are the two contemporaries to read against him on exactly those points.

What should I know about his private life?

In 1858, after twenty-two years of marriage and ten children, he separated from his wife Catherine, published a statement about it in his own magazine, and largely cut her out of the children's lives. He had by then met the actress Ellen Ternan, who was eighteen to his forty-five, and the relationship — which he concealed, and about which he destroyed a great deal of correspondence — continued until his death. His public reputation as the great celebrant of hearth and family was built during those same years.

In what order should I read his novels?

They are standalone, so any order works. A good route: A Christmas Carol, then Great Expectations, then Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, then Bleak House. Leave The Pickwick Papers until you are already a convert — it is his first, it is a series of comic episodes rather than a plot, and it puts off more first-time readers than anything else he wrote. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is unfinished and he died halfway through it.

Is it worth reading him in instalments?

It is genuinely worth trying once. Several publishers and reading groups now release the novels on the original schedule, and the books work differently that way: the cliffhangers land, the long gaps let the cast settle, and the coincidences feel less convenient when a year has passed rather than an afternoon. Bleak House in particular becomes a far better book when you cannot read ahead.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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

— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.

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