Charles Dickens Books Free Online: Where to Start, and What to Read Third
The usual advice about Dickens is to start with A Christmas Carol, and it is bad advice. A Christmas Carol is ninety pages, has one idea, and is unlike everything else he wrote — finish it and you know nothing about what reading a Dickens novel is like. The real problem with starting Dickens is not difficulty, it is length and shape: these were serials, published monthly for eighteen months, and they are built to be read that way. A reader who tries to consume Bleak House like a modern novel will drown around page 200.
Read a few chapters a week and the same book becomes the best thing on this page.
Eight of his books are free to read in the library, plus one curiosity.
Start here: Great Expectations
- Great Expectations — 1861, and the right first Dickens for almost everyone. It is his shortest mature novel, the plot is one thread rather than nine, and the first chapter — a boy in a graveyard, a convict rising out of the marsh — is the best opening he ever wrote. It is also the novel where he takes the rags-to-riches story he had made his career on and demonstrates that it corrupts the boy it happens to. Pip gets everything Oliver Twist gets and is ruined by it.
Miss Havisham in the stopped clocks and the rotting cake is the image everyone knows. What surprises first-time readers is how funny the book is, and how unsparing it is about its own narrator.
Then: David Copperfield
- David Copperfield — his own favourite, and half autobiography. The bottling-factory chapters, where a small boy is put to work and abandoned, are the closest Dickens came to writing directly about his own childhood, and he never told anyone the source while he lived. Longer and looser than Great Expectations, with the best gallery of characters in the language: Micawber, Uriah Heep, Betsey Trotwood, Steerforth.
Read this second. It is where you find out whether you want the long ones.
Then, if you do: Bleak House
- Bleak House — 1853, and the great one. Two narrators, one of them in the present tense fifty years before anyone else tried it, a lawsuit that has outlived everybody it concerned, a plot with a dozen strands that all turn out to be one strand. It contains a description of fog over London that people still quote, a spontaneous combustion, and the first proper detective in an English novel.
It is also 900 pages and the first hundred are deliberately disorienting. This is the book that most rewards reading it as a serial: a chunk a week, for a season. If you have read the two above and want to know why people make a fuss, this is the answer.
The historical novel
- A Tale of Two Cities — 1859, and the odd one out: short, plotted tightly, almost no comedy, and the French Revolution done as melodrama. It has the most famous opening sentence and the most famous closing sentence in English fiction and not much of the density in between. Many people's favourite Dickens and many people's least favourite, for the same reasons.
Good choice if the length of the others is what is stopping you. Bad choice if you want to know what he is normally like.
The one everyone starts with
- Oliver Twist — 1838, very early, and much cruder than the four above. Its interest is that it is a political intervention: Dickens was attacking the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 by name, and the workhouse chapters were meant to be unbearable. They still are.
Two things to know before handing it to a child. Fagin is a sustained antisemitic caricature — he is called "the Jew" for pages at a stretch — and there is no reading around it; Dickens himself half-acknowledged it decades later and revised some of the later text. And Nancy's death is more brutal than any adaptation makes it. It is a real book and it is not the gentle orphan story its reputation suggests. It appears alongside the rest of the genre in classic orphan stories free online.
The Christmas books
- A Christmas Carol — the one everybody knows, and worth reading precisely because you think you know it: the prose is much stranger and funnier than any film keeps, and Scrooge's conversion is grounded in a specific remembered loneliness rather than in magic. Ninety minutes. The original full title edition is here too, and Ghost Story of Christmas is the subtitle worth remembering — he thought of it as horror.
- The Cricket on the Hearth — 1845, the third of his five Christmas books, and enormously popular in its day. Domestic, sentimental, and now almost unread. Read it to see what the Victorian public actually wanted from him.
The curiosity
- The Magic Fishbone — a short fairy tale written in the voice of a seven-year-old girl called Alice Rainbird, complete with her opinions about her family. It is silly, it is genuinely funny, and it is the only thing on this page you can read to a small child.
The order, if you want one answer
Great Expectations → David Copperfield → Bleak House. Add A Christmas Carol whenever December arrives, and A Tale of Two Cities if you want a short one. Leave Oliver Twist until you are interested in Dickens the reformer rather than Dickens the novelist.
One practical note that applies to all of them: he was paid by the instalment and it shows. There are digressions, there are characters who exist to be funny for one chapter, and there are coincidences no editor would allow now. Skimming a paragraph is permitted. Giving up in month three is how everyone fails at Dickens, and reading twenty pages a week is how everyone succeeds.
If the length is what puts you off, short classics you can read in one sitting is the opposite shelf, and everything by him is on his author page.