Top 10 books by Charles Dickens
The novels are unlike any other writer’s. People have likened them to poems, to visions, to pantomime, and they are all these things. If you want to see how different he was to all his contemporaries, just try to imagine George Eliot or Thackeray or the Brontë sisters doing those reading tours, when thousands of people, the poor in multitudes, came to hear him. Nothing like it had been seen since John Wesley’s preaching tours.
There have been thousands of books on Dickens. I wanted, nevertheless, in The Mystery of Charles Dickens to set down some of my lifelong obsession with his work. One thing I wanted to winkle out, if I could, was the relationship between the life and the work. Something much more complicated was going on than with most novelists, all of whom take versions of their own lives and turn them into fiction. At a much deeper level than most, Dickens was confronting his own demons – the wretched childhood, the appalling relations with women – and turning them into melodrama, tragedy, farce, burlesque. That sense we all flickeringly retain of our childhood self watching the behaviour of the baffling and often scary grownups – that sense in him was hyper-developed, and it is what turbocharged the books.
1. Selected Journalism 1850-1870 (edited by David Pascoe) It might seem paradoxical to start my list with the journalism, but Dickens began as a journalist and he never stopped being one. While pursuing a life as a prolific novelist, tireless charity worker, fairly frequent actor, Dickens kept up weekly journalism, and edited two of his own periodicals, Household Words and All the Year Round. Try reading A Nightly Scene in London from 1856, in which
Dickens takes us to Whitechapel, where he finds five bundles of old rags thrown down by the walls of the workhouse. The bundles turn out to be women, of course. One of his strongest pieces. Or read Lying Awake, the justly famous account of the joint public hanging of the Mannings, a married pair of murderers.
2. Sketches By BozAgain, journalism, but journalism morphing into the fiction. He took the name Boz from his brother Augustus’s nickname. Published the year before Victoria became queen, and written when he was in his early 20s, it is so vivid, so warm, so comic, so passionate. London Recreations, whose title is self-explanatory, is not merely descriptive. It contains that hatred of busybodydom and evangelical humbug that burst out in a more mature essay for Household Words, The Great Baby – the baby being the public, patronised by Those Who Know Best.
3. American NotesA better account of the young Dickens’s take on the US than the one novel I’d deem a failure, Martin Chuzzlewit. He visited America’s prisons, saw its great landscapes, appreciated its hospitality and openheartedness. But he could not stick the evangelical Christianity. “Wherever religion is resorted to, as a strong drink, and as an escape from the dull monotonous round of home, those of its ministers who pepper the highest will be surest to please. They who strew the Eternal Path with the greatest amount of brimstone, and who most ruthlessly tread down the flowers and leaves that grow by the wayside, will be voted the most righteous”.
4. A Christmas CarolIn many ways this, the most famous of all his books, is his best. Christmas was central to his world-vision that simply trying to be a little kinder to one another both as individuals and as a society might be an experiment worth trying. If, reading these words, you have never tried a book by Dickens, I’d recommend starting with the famous story of how Scrooge was converted from a belief in money and power into someone who saw the power of love. The fact that it is set in the form of a fairytale is a good preparation for the longer fiction all of which, at its most successful, possesses some of the power of such stories.
5. David CopperfieldHis own personal favourite among the novels. A book that can make me – and millions of others – weep and laugh out loud, often on the same page. A sort of autobiography, but one in which all his family have been expunged. David’s father is dead before the book begins, his mother dies when he is still very young. And unlike Dickens, David has