Dickens published nine of his novels on this site between 1837 and 1865, and almost all of them appeared in monthly or weekly parts before they were books. The order below is the order in which the parts began appearing.
That serial method explains a lot about the shape of the novels: the early ones are loose and digressive because he was writing to a deadline with a public reading over his shoulder, and the late ones are tightly engineered because he had learned to plan the parts before he began.
The word counts on this site are for the complete texts, so the longest, David Copperfield and Bleak House, run past 350,000 words. If you want to see whether you get on with him before committing to that, start with the short one.
Where to start
Great Expectations — the late, tightly plotted Dickens at his best, and the one most often taught. If you want the comic Dickens instead, take David Copperfield, and if you want something you can finish in an evening, A Christmas Carol.
Charles Dickens in publication order
Numbered by first publication. Word counts and reading times are for the text on this site.
| # | Year | Title | Words | Reading time | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1837 | The Pickwick Papers | 301,000 | 16.7 h | First novel, issued in monthly parts, 1836–37. |
| 2 | 1838 | Oliver Twist | 161,010 | 8.9 h | Began while Pickwick was still being serialised. |
| 3 | 1843 | A Christmas Carol | 29,000 | 1.6 h | Written in six weeks for the 1843 Christmas market. |
| 4 | 1850 | David Copperfield | 357,000 | 19.8 h | The most autobiographical of the novels. |
| 5 | 1853 | Bleak House | 351,226 | 19.5 h | Monthly parts, 1852–53; his longest completed novel. |
| 6 | 1854 | Hard Times | 103,000 | 5.7 h | His shortest novel, serialised in Household Words. |
| 7 | 1859 | A Tale of Two Cities | 136,000 | 7.6 h | London and Paris, 1859. |
| 8 | 1861 | Great Expectations | 184,000 | 10.2 h | Serialised 1860–61; he wrote a revised ending. |
| 9 | 1865 | Our Mutual Friend | 324,000 | 18.0 h | The last novel he completed. |
How to read Charles Dickens
- Publication order. Pickwick Papers in 1837 through Our Mutual Friend in 1865. It is the standard way to watch the style change from episodic comedy to social panorama.
- Shortest first. A Christmas Carol, at about 29,000 words, is the obvious entry point if length is the obstacle. Hard Times, at around 103,000, is the shortest of the full novels.
- The late run. Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, written between 1853 and 1865, are the four that most modern readers rate highest.
There is no series here and no required sequence. The only trap is starting with Pickwick Papers, which is the funniest and the least typical, and gives a false sense of what the later novels are like.
Every title above has a page here with chapter summaries, the word count, reading time, and free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files. Charles Dickens’s shelf · Victorian novels · Longest classic novels — or go back to Charles Dickens for the full shelf.