Charles Dickens may well be the most ingenious author in English literature. The energy of his inventiveness gave birth to a gallery of characters — from Oliver Twist to Ebenezer Scrooge — whose lives have overflowed the boundaries of his books to become permanent fixtures in the collective imagination. So strong is the shadow cast by his work — and by such monuments of storytelling as Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities — on our idea of the novel that it obscures how sui generis his writing is. A hundred years after the author’s heyday, J. B. Priestley was insightful — and brave — enough to suggest that “this great novelist was not, strictly speaking, a novelist at all.” Indeed, the gifts of observation and inspiration that Dickens possessed (or that possessed him) demanded their own creative venue, and his books seem not so much plotted by their author as traversed: If London had not existed to be his muse, he would have had to invent another city as teeming and multitudinous, as physically present and as psychologically unfathomable to engage his genius. Unlike Austen or Trollope, Flaubert or Henry James, Dickens does not manage the action of his tales within defined social or aesthetic borders; rather, he leads the reader down avenues and alleyways that are strange, vivid, filled with looming, often murky phenomena. At once familiar and ominous, the Dickensian world is a dreamscape in which states of heart and mind are rendered from an excess of palpable detail.
When we open one of his formidable tomes, we soon recognize a peculiar sense of dynamism: It’s as if the author has not set out to write a novel, but has been dropped into a pulsing reality he has to write his way through, improvising a narrative out of the available material, much in the way we must construct a life. That may be why so many of his novels — the early, Dickensian-defining ones especially, such as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, culminating in David Copperfield — begin with the birth of a protagonist and follow his adventures into adulthood, as if chronology provides the only possible organizing principle. No surprise, then, that the stories are ultimately about fate, which may seem to unfold around his heroes, but is more truly dependent upon their discovering, one step at a time, the destinations of their personal journeys.
This “biographical” approach suggests a reason his supporting characters, who contribute so much to our pleasure in reading Dickens, are so boldly drawn, their defining traits exaggerated to within an inch of caricature. Think of Wackford Squeers, the wicked schoolmaster in Nickleby, or the obsequious Uriah Heep in Copperfield, or the eternally disappointed bride, Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations. For all their vivid presence and comic (even when sinister) verve, these figures are described not as beings but as experiences. What we remember of people in our own pasts has a similar quality. Recall your favorite aunt and you’ll see in miniature what Dickens does at scale: The qualities that define a person in recollection are those that are larger than life, markers for the whole being that serve as milestones in memory. Just so, his characters are both less naturalistic and more real than the creations of other novelists, the way a snapshot colored with reminiscences can coalesce our lived experience more tellingly than a return visit to its physical setting. It is the way our minds and our memories work, animating people and places whenever we turn our attention to them fully. Uniquely, Dickens does this not only with his characters, but also with streets and buildings, landscapes and weather, moral challenges and social conventions, even government offices: There has never been a more exact description of what bureaucratic processes feel like than that of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. Dickens discovered stories wherever he looked — in the shape of chimneys, in law courts, in fog — even before he peopled them with characters. He knew that we live in stories every minute, and he found them for us everywhere; no other writer sweeps us up into the moment-by-moment storyness of life in quite the same way.
All of which can make his novels — to some literary scholars, at least — seem messy, rambunctious, and arbitrary in construction, imperfect equations when their parts are summed. The enduring popularity of his creations proves a more general truth: For readers, if not critics, the formal perfection of a book is not as important as its imaginative life.
David Copperfield
“Of all my books, I like this the best.”
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
So begins this marvelous narrative, a novel so filled with character, invention, suspense, and inspired storytelling that one finishes it with an overwhelming regret: The turning of the last page closes the book on such a vivid world that one feels immediately impoverished. Dickens famously called Copperfield the “favourite child” of his literary brood, and its autobiographical frame goes some way toward explaining why. The eighth of his novels to be written, it is the first one narrated in the first person, and, from the opening words, the direct address of the protagonist is captivating. The coming-of-age tale that David relates has many points of contact with Dickens’s own experiences as the son of a debtor, as an adolescent employee in a factory, as a parliamentary reporter, and, lastly, as a successful novelist.
The book is peopled with enough memorable characters to sustain the careers of a half dozen storytellers. The cast includes — to mention only a few — David’s imperious aunt, Betsey Trotwood, who comes to his rescue with an asperity as sharp as her magnanimity is deep; Aunt Betsey’s simple-minded protégé and muse, Mr. Dick; the improvident, incorrigibly optimistic, and unabashedly grandiloquent Mr. Micawber; the charming, caddish seducer Steerforth; the unforgivable, unforgettably named Uriah Heep, whose unctuous servility cannot mask his evil intent; and David’s childhood housekeeper and lifelong ally, the stalwart Peggotty, whose caring nature reflects the unaffected nobility of her family of Yarmouth fishermen. Through all the plotting and sub-plotting, the overriding sentiment of Dickensian fiction — that there is a goodness abroad in the world that courses beneath the surface complexion of beauty, the façades of wealth and privilege, and the social currency of fashion, even when we least expect it — carries the hero of this novel toward the satisfaction of a happy ending. You shouldn’t read only one Dickens, but if you do, make it David Copperfield.
Oliver Twist
The Orphan as Hero
“Please, sir, I want some more” is among the most famous utterances in Dickens. It’s spoken by a very small orphan named Oliver Twist to the man in charge of ladling out the meager meals Oliver shares with his fellow inmates in the workhouse established by society to house impoverished youngsters. In a single sentence, it conjures all the forces at the heart of Oliver’s tale: innocence, want, mischief, hunger, boldness, desperation, misfortune. And, last but not least, institutionally sanctioned cruelty: “The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle, pinioned him in his arms, and shrieked aloud for the beadle.”
Oliver Twist was its author’s second novel, telling a continuous story in a way his first, the delightful but episodic Pickwick Papers, did not. What’s innovative in the book is not its shape, however, but its focus: Never before had a child been put so center stage in a novel; more importantly, while Wordsworth had evoked it in verse, never before had childhood been treated in a prolonged narrative as a state of being in its own right, with all the colors and contours of an emotional landscape as fully developed as an adult’s.
As Oliver progresses from workhouse minion to undertaker’s assistant, then to conscript in the thieving army of urchin pickpockets led by the Artful Dodger and in thrall to the seedy ringleader Fagin, the reader is treated to a searing social satire on the treatment of paupers and bereft children, a vivid portrait of the urban criminal underworld, and a suspenseful if murky plot that is a roller coaster of melodramatic hopes and fears, degradations and redemptions. It’s an exhilarating chase, led by a young writer learning to harness his extraordinary creative energy.
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
Pure Storytelling Bliss
The title given this novel for its serial publication (over nineteen months in 1837 through 1839) sums up its rambunctious plot: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes, Uprisings, Downfallings and Complete Career of the Nickleby Family. A descendant of the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, Nickleby inherits from its literary forebears a penniless young hero who — equipped only with luck and native wit — must make his way in the world against forces of iniquity, depravity, and greed. Those evil attributes are embodied especially in Nicholas’s dastardly uncle, Ralph, who is determined, out of sheer malice, to thwart his nephew’s fortune, just as the Cheeryble brothers, Nicholas’s eventual employers and perfect models of Dickensian benevolence, are determined to help him make it.
Before he gets to the Cheerybles, however, Nicholas is apprenticed by his uncle to Wackford Squeers, the very model of a modern wicked schoolmaster, whose educational establishment, Dotheboys (say it as three words: “Do-the-boys”) Hall, provides ample opportunity for Dickens to attack the brutal conditions of contemporary boarding schools. Nicholas’s subsequent adventures include a stint in a traveling theater company, depicted by the author with much relish and comic verve, and several encounters with the spiteful initiatives of his uncle, each designed to obstruct Nicholas’s success or threaten the virtue and well-being of his sister and mother. With luck, stalwart friends, and a good heart, our hero, of course, triumphs, not without timely help from Newman Noggs, a failed gentleman impressed by poverty into the service of Ralph Nickleby — until he emerges from his own shadow to upset his employer’s villainous designs.
A Christmas Carol
From Humbug to the Happiest of Holidays
You know the story of this quintessential holiday tale, but have you ever read it? So many times has the tale been told — in numerous stage and screen adaptations — that we are apt to take the power of its invention for granted. Yet no retelling comes close to capturing the humor and human sympathy, the delicious spookiness and ultimate good cheer of Dickens’s original narrative.
In less than a hundred pages, A Christmas Carol relates, with an imaginative richness that belies its brevity, how the crabbed soul of an uncaring old man, Ebenezer Scrooge, is summoned back to generous life by the visitations of four spirits: first the shade of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, and then the spirits of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come. Through their hauntings, Scrooge is moved by fear and understanding to embrace the abandoned affections of his youth, confront the meanness of his current existence, and recognize the sordid end he’ll meet if he does not change his ways.
All of the author’s famous gifts are on display in this cheering fable of a miser’s Christmas Eve metamorphosis from misanthrope to man of good will, including his talent for deft characterization (in the figure, for instance, of Scrooge’s clerk, the put-upon but ever hopeful Bob Cratchit); for poignant sentiment (in the figure of Cratchit’s lame son, Tiny Tim); and for ingenious monikers (was any curmudgeon ever more aptly named than Ebenezer Scrooge?). If my volume 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die was nine hundred books shorter, A Christmas Carol would still be in it.
Dombey and Son
A Family’s Fortune
The first novel that Dickens planned in detail before beginning composition, Dombey and Son marks a turning point in his development, ushering in the period of his mature works. Abandoning the pleasures of the picaresque and the improvisatory impulses of his earlier novels, it gains in their stead a surer sense of structure and thematic coherence, allowing Dickens to inform his story with a more focused social consciousness. As a result, in concert with telling the tale of a man of business and his family, the narrative of Dombey and Son illuminates the tumultuous changes wrought, in mid-nineteenth- century England, by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of mercantile culture.
In outline, the plot is simple: A successful shipping magnate, Paul Dombey, is desperate for a male heir to validate for the next generation the name of the family firm, Dombey and Son. His pride blinds him to the havoc his single-mindedness wreaks in the lives of his daughter, his ill-fated wife, and the sickly son she gives birth to, young Paul, who will die before he reaches adolescence. Around this frame are wrapped several comic, dramatic, and suspenseful sub-plots, as well as penetrating passages on the effects of new economic forces, which threaten — with the full support of Mr. Dombey — to transform human interaction to “a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting.” The most powerful of these forces is the advent of the railroad, to which Dickens returns throughout the book, charting how its tracks disrupt the “law and custom” of every neighborhood they cleave, eventually pulling precincts and people into the magnetic influence of the economic development they speed.
From the opening chapter, in which the word “house” is ominously informed by its dual meaning as both the family’s home and the firm of Dombey and Son, to the last, in which Mr. Dombey reaches a level of self-knowledge that allows sentiment to temper strict calculation, the emotional strains of Dombey and Son echo those of A Christmas Carol — in a minor key, perhaps, but on a grander scale. Throughout, Dickens writes with a confidence that makes this novel, although one of his lesser known, among his most satisfying.
Bleak House
A Treasure House of Invention and Sentiment
Although it lacks the affectionate warmth of David Copperfield and the narrative unity of Great Expectations, Bleak House is considered by many critics to be its author’s greatest achievement. Unlike those other two novels, which, of course, have their own ardent champions, Bleak House is not steeped in childhood or focused on the unfolding of a childhood’s layers of hopes and sorrows in later life; it is a novel of adulthood, a nuanced exploration of social mores, economic and legal entanglement, romantic passion, mature love, and murderous envy.
Innovative in its structure, it is told in two distinct and alternating voices. The first — third-person, present tense, omniscient in perspective — ranges widely through the fashions and foibles of contemporary society, from the sclerotic and treacherous confusion of the Chancery courts to the dilettantish do-gooding of self-regarding philanthropy. Immediate and often satiric, this voice is contrasted with the first-person narration of Esther Summerson, an apparent orphan with a real heart of gold, whose modesty, capability, and emotional intelligence bring a reflective and generous cast to the storytelling.
Along with the dual narration, the complexity of the plot, which is fed by many tributaries, creates an atmosphere of obscure machination that is perfectly evoked by the novel’s famous opening paragraphs, in which the actuality of all of London seems to be diffusing itself into a sodden, shadowy netherworld: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping.” At the center of this netherworld, “at the very heart of the fog,” Dickens writes, “sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.” There, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the notoriously protracted case of a contested will that has consumed the best energies of several generations of litigants, spins its web of futility and disappointment — a web that, one way or another, ensnares the characters of Bleak House, from Esther to the young lovers, Ada Clare and Richard Capstone; from John Jarndyce, Esther’s noble and gentle savior, to Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock; from the homeless street sweeper, Jo, to the insidious attorney Tulkinghorn. As always in Dickens’s best novels, the cast of ancillary personalities is rife with memorable actors, including the resolutely shiftless Howard Skimpole and the relentlessly observant Inspector Bucket, the first professional sleuth to play a central role in a major English novel.
This capacious book — it runs to nearly a thousand pages — seems to be a compendium of everything its author had learned about inventing characters and telling stories. It weaves several strands of popular (or soon to be popular) fiction — social satire, romance, sentimental education, the novel of sensation, and the detective story — into a single vast tapestry of reading that is surprising, intellectually compelling, and wholly satisfying.
A Tale of Two Cities
The Classic Novel of the French Revolution
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . .
A Tale of Two Cities may have the most famous opening of any novel ever written, the frequent application of its words outside the novel’s specific context giving it an edge over the nearest competition, Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice. Echoing the dichotomies invoked in its opening sentences, the work unfolds in a series of parallels and mirrorings, alternating between London and Paris in the years before and during the French Revolution. Indeed, the plot turns on the uncanny resemblance between two men, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, the first a progressive noble from an aristocratic, cruelly reactionary French family, the second a brilliant but dissolute English lawyer who both represents and resents Darnay, ultimately coming to his rescue when the Frenchman falls afoul of the Revolution’s unforgiving fervor.
Despite being among its author’s most widely read novels, A Tale of Two Cities is the least Dickensian. Swept along by the rapid movement of the complex plot, and the frantic history that propels it, the narrative reveals character through action and incident rather than through Dickens’s more typical reliance on dialogue and personality quirks. Missing, too, is the sense of comedy that leavens and enlivens even the darkest of his other books. As a consequence, A Tale of Two Cities is the neatest storytelling contrivance in Dickens’s oeuvre. Although it lacks the warmth and humor of his other tales, it has the alternately intimate and violent passions of the Revolution — both brilliantly embodied in the baleful figure of Madame Defarge, knitting and scheming with ruthless intensity — to meld its themes of vendetta, betrayal, regret, sacrifice, and resurrection into a headlong chronicle of historical drama and personal nobility. The pageant concludes with Carton’s final thoughts, nearly as memorable in expression as the novel’s first lines: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
Great Expectations
Destiny’s Promises
Like David Copperfield, Great Expectations is the story of a child’s coming-of-age, told in the first person. Like David Copperfield as well, it is the story of a young man’s coming to grips with his unassuming legacy and practical place in the world. More nuanced and darker in mood than the earlier novel, however, Great Expectations is its author’s deepest working of the terrain of childhood and the fears and fates that spring from it. Anchored in a Kentish village, around which the years and events of the complicated plot will revolve, the book returns Dickens to his native ground in search not of autobiographical details, but of the familiar spirits and psychological tempers that nurtured his imagination: the injuries of class, the uncertainties of love, the snobberies of fashion, the limited purview of personal agency, the coincidence — or is it more? — that links crime and fortune, or goodness and inequity.
From the thrilling opening scene — in which the young Philip Pirrip (or simply Pip, as he introduces himself) is surprised on a visit to his parents’ graveside by an escaped convict who presses the boy into his service — we are seized by the story and pulled into its embrace. As we follow Pip’s progress — his thralldom to the alluring young Estella; his fascination with Miss Havisham (one of Dickens’s greatest characters, a woman so traumatized by disappointment that she has sat for years, transfixed by loss, in the setting of her unconsummated wedding celebration); the arrival of his “great expectations” in the form of an inheritance whose source is mysterious; his estrangement from his good and noble brother-in-law, Joe Gargery — we are held rapt by the choreography of character, incident, and brilliantly paced suspense.
Dickens notoriously rewrote the final scene, mitigating the bleakness of his original ending to offer the promise of a fulfilling reconciliation between Pip and Estella. Whatever the particulars of the pair’s destiny, the rich satisfactions of the novel remain. In the end, Great Expectations is not really about expectation at all, but about regret, and as powerfully so as any book in our language. Where Pip’s literary sibling David Copperfield is discovering his future, making his way in the world, the protagonist of Great Expectations is uncovering his past, illuminating all the shadows of the self that remembrance can conjure. Moving with narrative verve between London and the countryside, the book depicts in vivid colors the humbling of youthful presumptions by the inscrutable and — for the lucky, at least — wisdom-inducing quandaries of life.