Read Charles Dickens Books in Order
My grandfather was a Dickens man. Every novel on the shelf, read and re-read, spines cracked, pages slightly yellowed — and all of it completely available to me from a very young age. Which is how I ended up having finished the complete works before I turned ten. Not a reading plan I’d necessarily prescribe, but here we are.
If you’ve been reading about bookish London on this site, you already know how much of this city Dickens claimed as his own. He walked London compulsively — sometimes twenty miles a night — and it shows on every page. This is your complete guide to the novels, in the order he wrote them.
Fifteen novels, published between 1837 and 1870, almost all serialised in monthly or weekly instalments. The prestige TV of Victorian Britain, essentially.
The Novels in Order
1. The Pickwick Papers (1837)
Mr Samuel Pickwick and the members of his club embark on a series of comic journeys across England, getting into increasingly absurd misadventures along the way. Dickens’s debut novel, and the one that made him famous almost immediately. Lighter in tone than everything that follows — more picaresque comedy than social critique — but the energy and invention are unmistakable from the very first page.
2. Oliver Twist (1837–1839)
Born in a workhouse and passed between parishes, young Oliver Twist falls in with a gang of pickpockets in the back streets of London. A searing attack on the Poor Law and the treatment of children in Victorian England, and one of the earliest social novels in the language. Fagin, the Artful Dodger, and Bill Sikes remain among the most recognisable characters Dickens ever created.
3. Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839)
After his father dies bankrupt, Nicholas Nickleby must find a way to support his mother and sister while navigating a brutal Yorkshire boarding school, a travelling theatre company, and the machinations of his villainous uncle Ralph. Dickens at his most entertaining, and one of his most warm-hearted novels.
4. The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841)
Little Nell and her grandfather are forced to flee London when their home falls into the hands of the monstrous moneylender Quilp. When serialised, readers on both sides of the Atlantic awaited each new instalment with genuine anguish — crowds gathered at the New York docks waiting for ships carrying the latest chapter. The death of Little Nell became one of the great public literary events of the Victorian era. Oscar Wilde called it impossible to read without laughing. Make of that what you will.
5. Barnaby Rudge (1841)
Set against the Gordon Riots of 1780 — the anti-Catholic mob violence that tore through London — Dickens’s first historical novel follows the gentle, intellectually disabled Barnaby Rudge as he becomes unwittingly caught up in the chaos. Dark and underrated, and more politically complex than most of his earlier work.
6. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844)
The Chuzzlewit family circle revolves around the question of who will inherit old Martin’s fortune — a question that brings out the worst in almost everyone involved. A broad satire of selfishness and hypocrisy, featuring Mrs Gamp, one of the great comic characters in English literature, and a lengthy American section that caused significant offence in the United States upon publication.
7. Dombey and Son (1846–1848)
Paul Dombey is a wealthy merchant consumed by his business and his desire for a male heir to carry on the family name. His daughter Florence loves him completely; he barely registers her existence. A novel about pride, emotional neglect, and the human cost of placing commerce above everything else. One of Dickens’s most quietly devastating works, and frequently overlooked.
8. David Copperfield (1849–1850)
The story of David Copperfield, from his difficult childhood through love, loss, and eventual success as a writer — drawing heavily on Dickens’s own early life, including his time working in a blacking factory as a boy. His most autobiographical novel, and the one he described as his “favourite child.” Also the home of Uriah Heep, one of literature’s great creeps.
9. Bleak House (1852–1853)
The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has wound through the Court of Chancery for so long that no one can remember how it started. Around it, Dickens constructs a vast novel of interconnected lives — told partly by the heroine Esther Summerson, partly by an ominous omniscient narrator — that takes in murder, blackmail, spontaneous combustion, and the grinding machinery of the English legal system. Widely considered his greatest novel.
10. Hard Times (1854)
In the industrial mill town of Coketown, Thomas Gradgrind raises his children on a philosophy of pure fact and rational self-interest — with predictably damaging results. Dickens’s shortest novel and his most openly polemical, written as a direct attack on utilitarianism and the dehumanising effects of industrialisation.
11. Little Dorrit (1855–1857)
Arthur Clennam returns to London after twenty years abroad and becomes entangled with Amy Dorrit — Little Dorrit — whose father has spent most of his life imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. A novel about bureaucratic obstruction, financial fraud, and the many forms imprisonment can take, informed by Dickens’s own father’s time in the Marshalsea. Features the Circumlocution Office, a government department whose sole function is avoiding getting anything done.
12. A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Set against the French Revolution, moving between London and Paris as the Terror takes hold. Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a dissolute English lawyer, are drawn into the chaos in ways that will define both their fates. The most plot-driven of Dickens’s major novels, and by some estimates the best-selling novel of all time.
13. Great Expectations (1860–1861)
Pip is a poor orphan boy on the Kent marshes whose life is suddenly transformed when an anonymous benefactor provides him with the means to become a gentleman. As he makes his way in London, the mystery of who his benefactor is — and what they want — slowly unfolds. Miss Havisham, Estella, Magwitch, and the rotting wedding cake: some of the most indelible images in all of English fiction. Dickens revised the ending after a friend told him the original was too bleak; both versions survive.
14. Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865)
When a body is pulled from the Thames and identified as John Harmon — due to inherit a fortune from his father’s dust heap business — his supposed death sets off a chain of events involving mistaken identities, social climbing, and the murky world of the river. The last novel Dickens completed, and his most experimental.
15. The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
John Jasper, choirmaster at Cloisterham Cathedral, is secretly obsessed with his nephew Edwin Drood — and with the opium dens of London. When Edwin disappears, suspicion falls on Jasper. Dickens died in June 1870 having completed only six of the planned twelve instalments. The murderer, the method, and the solution remain unknown. What exists is gripping; what doesn’t exist is one of literature’s great frustrations.
Where to Start
OK so my number one recommendation, always, is Great Expectations. It’s my favourite, and I think it’s the perfect gateway novel — not too long, not too sprawling, the plot actually moves, and the characters are so vivid you feel like you’ve met them. Miss Havisham alone is worth the price of entry. Start here.
If you’ve done Great Expectations and want the next level: Bleak House. This is the big one. Longer, denser, more digressive — but it pays off in a way that very few novels do. When people say Dickens is a genius, this is the evidence they’re citing.
A Christmas Carol technically doesn’t make this list because it’s a novella, not a novel — but everyone knows Scrooge, everyone knows Tiny Tim, and if you haven’t actually read it (as opposed to watched seventeen film adaptations of it), it’s short enough that you have no excuse. Read it in December. Obviously.
And A Tale of Two Cities — look, it’s brilliant. Genuinely. But this is the one you read when you’re fully committed and ready to go all the way with Dickens. Not the starting point. Save it for when you’re deep in and want something that hits differently. You’ll know when you’re ready.
The London Dickens walked, wrote about, and immortalised is all still there — [here’s how to find it.]