Books

Bleak House is the great writer’s grandest, most virtuosic achievement.

The older Dickens got, the darker his books. With Great Expectations, he asks: How long can a society ignore the nefarious, corrupt or compromised sources of its wealth?

Dickens wrote fourteen and a half novels, which means that any devotee of his work runs the risk of running out. I recommend the titles below to fill the void and expand your sense of both his literary scene and his legacy. …

Contemporary critical reception of Dickens’ 11th novel was mixed, but in keeping with the gradual swing toward appreciation of the darker Dickens, it now stands as proof of his genius.

Every time I read the book I think, the story of a boy who overcomes adversity and grows up to be a writer? That’s the most cliché first-novel idea around. Except that it was Dickens’ eighth, and it marked a departure.

Our Mutual Friend has one major flaw, for which I can’t quite forgive it. But it also has some of Dickens’ strangest, most haunting characters.

Forget for a moment that it has become one of the most clichéd passages in literature, and read the opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was

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For decades after Dickens’ death, The Pickwick Papers remained his most beloved book. It has largely fallen off the map, but once you’ve read Pickwick, you see how crucial it is to the Dickens canon.