2. THE 15 NOVELS OF CHARLES DICKENS

Dickens’s first and funniest novel, published when he was only 25, was a huge worldwide hit that had people lining up on the wharfs in Sydney and New York when the boats came in with the latest instalment.
With a hundred English and American editions before 1900, it was probably the best-selling novel of the whole 19th Century, worldwide.
A comical English version of the Don Quixote/Sancho Panza theme, with an utterly likeable but impractical nouveau riche would-be gentleman from (...)

This was the second consecutive worldwide success for Dickens at the age of 26(!), and it was a shock to his vast public, who were looking for another Cockney comedy in the vein of The Pickwick Papers, but got instead a hard-hitting description of some of the most shocking aspects of the social conditions of the world’s most advanced country at the time: criminal child neglect in orphanages, inhuman conditions in public work houses, crime and prostitution ...
This is sock-it-to-’em (...)

Where the penniless young Nicholas goes up to the wilds of Yorkshire to begin a teaching career and finds himself with am schoolmaster who’s extravagantly and ruthlessly exploiting and mistreating his pupils there, then flees down south after a dramatic show-down to join a roving band of actors and to get involved in many more pages of rousing and often thoroughly comical adventures peopled by a quite extraordinary number of quite wonderful "Dickensian" secondary personages.
Coming on (...)

Dickens’s fourth novel, another huge best-seller, a «road novel» about the adorable Little Nell and her grandfather on the run all around England from a cruel, grasping creditor, no doubt the most villainous villain in all of his works.
The young heroine shines like a beacon through the gloomy moral and physical aspect of England of the times that Dickens was so good at portraying. She caught the imagination of the reading public like few characters before or since ever have.
The Old (...)

Dickens’s first historical novel, set in the period of the ultra-violent anti-catholic Gordon Riots in the London of 1780 that saw angry mobs storm into the Parliament buildings, destroy the central Newgate prison and other buildings and shake the state to its very foundations.
The historical novel genre, the untopical subject matter and the unusual simple-minded central figure of the title perhaps explain. at least partially, the public’s initial rejection of the book, which has (...)

The most interesting aspect of this middle-period Dickens novel is that most of it takes places in the United States, whereto Martin flees to escape from disgrace in London and to make his fortune. However, everyone in New York is a hustler scrambling after the almighty dollar, and things get (much) worse when he goes pioneering down south along the Mississippi river to take possession of a property he has been sold by a glib New-Yorker shyster.
Although the book abounds in stunning (...)

After the huge popular successes of his first four novels and the lukewarm reception by the mass public of the next two, but encouraged by the success of his Christmas Carol stories published in 1843, Dickens raised his sights and clearly aimed at impressing the arbiters of literary good taste, to show them just what he could do.

Dombey and Son thus flows at a calmer, more sedate pace than any of his previous works, with more attention to atmosphere and psychology and with somewhat (...)

This portrait of a sensitive young boy’s struggles with his school mentors and with his schoolmates is as powerful and humanistic as anything Dickens or anyone else ever wrote, and the hard-hearted but oh-so-smooth uncle Mr. Murdstone is as worthy a villain — always a Dickens strong point — as any in his oeuvre.
One of Dickens’s best-known and most-read works [1], with wonderfully characteristic and even famous secondary characters such as the creepy Uriah Heep and the eternally (...)

A blockbuster of a book [1], with what was for Dickens a big theme: the incredibly antiquated and abstruse, bureaucratic procedures involved in property legislation via the time-hallowed Chancery Law courts – that however at the time of its publication had already been essentially abolished.
Today the very lengthy satire about the inefficiencies of that antiquated system has lost much of its sting and one can easily find the subject overworked, although it cannot be denied that as a (...)

The only book in which Dickens ventures into the industrial heartland of the England of his time, the sprawling factory belt in the north around Manchester and Liverpool. Also the shortest of all his novels, slightly above one-third the average length of the others.
The hard-hitting portrayal of the exploitation of workers by unscrupulous factory owners and the poignant description of the near-starvation-level living standards of male and female workers in the burgeoning factory towns of (...)