Start with Great Expectations. It is the shortest of the major novels, the most tightly plotted, and the only late one told in the first person, which gives it a directness the others lack. Everything Dickens does is in it — the grotesque comic minor characters, the convoluted plot that turns out to have been fair all along, the fury about money and class — compressed into about four hundred pages instead of eight hundred.
Two very common starting points are traps. A Christmas Carol is excellent and takes ninety minutes, but it is a ghost story with a moral, not a Dickens novel, and it prepares you for nothing. The Pickwick Papers was his first great success and is a genuinely funny book, but it is eight hundred pages of episodic comic incident with no plot to pull you along, and it is where more first-time Dickens readers stall than anywhere else. Read Pickwick when you already love him and want to spend a month in his company.
Publication order versus reading order
Dickens's novels are entirely independent — no recurring characters, no continuity — so publication order buys you only one thing: watching him develop from a comic sketch writer into the most formidable novelist of his century. That is a real pleasure and a bad first plan, because the early novels are looser and baggier than the late ones.
Read best-first, then fill in chronologically. If you want a compromise, read Great Expectations, then jump to the early work, then return to the late masterpieces. That way the development is still visible and you never risk starting on a weak book.
The second and third books
Oliver Twist is the early novel that still reads fastest: Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, a workhouse and a murder. It is melodramatic and the plot's coincidences are outrageous, but it moves.
A Tale of Two Cities is the other common second choice and it needs an honest warning. It is short, dramatic and has the most famous opening and closing lines in English fiction — and it is the least characteristic thing he wrote. Almost no comedy, few of the eccentric minor characters, a taut historical plot instead of a sprawling social panorama. Readers who love it sometimes find the rest of Dickens baggy; readers who love the rest sometimes find it thin. It is a good novel and a misleading sample.
David Copperfield was Dickens's own favourite and is the most autobiographical. It is long, warm and episodic, and it contains Micawber and Uriah Heep. If you want to know what it feels like to live inside a Dickens novel rather than be plotted through one, this is the book.
The late masterpieces
Bleak House is, by a large majority of modern critical opinion, his best novel: an interminable Chancery lawsuit as the organising metaphor for a whole society, with a dual narration that alternates between a third-person present tense and a first-person memoir. It is also the one with the hardest entry. The first hundred and fifty pages introduce a great many characters and withhold the connections between them on purpose, and the fog of the opening chapter is a promise about how the book will feel. Push through. Once the threads begin joining, nothing else in Victorian fiction does what it does.
Our Mutual Friend is the last completed novel and the strangest — money, drowned bodies, dust heaps, and a plot built on concealed identity. Read it after Bleak House, when you trust him.
The two specialists
Dombey and Son is the transitional book where Dickens first plans a novel around a single controlling theme rather than a sequence of incidents, and it matters more to people interested in his development than to first-time readers. Hard Times is the short one, frequently assigned in schools, and the least representative: a compressed polemic against utilitarian education and factory conditions with almost none of the comic abundance that makes him worth reading. It is a bad place to start and a fine place to visit later.
Where to stop
If Bleak House works on you, you are a Dickensian and there are ten more novels waiting. If it does not, you have read four of the best books in English and can stop with a clear conscience.
More classic literature paths are on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Charles Dickens Reading Order: Where to Start.
