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Charles Dickens Books In Order

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Publication Order of Standalone Novels

The Pickwick Papers (1837)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1838)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby (1839)Description / Buy at Amazon
Barnaby Rudge (1841)Description / Buy at Amazon
Master Humphrey's Clock (1841)Description / Buy at Amazon
Old Curiosity Shop (1841)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Christmas Carol (1843)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Chimes (1844)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Battle of Life (1846)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dombey and Son (1848)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)Description / Buy at Amazon
David Copperfield (1850)Description / Buy at Amazon
Bleak House (1853)Description / Buy at Amazon
Hard Times (1854)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Child's History of England (1854)Description / Buy at Amazon
Little Dorrit (1855)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Hanged Man's Bride (1857)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Tale of Two Cities (1859)Description / Buy at Amazon
Great Expectations (1861)Description / Buy at Amazon
Our Mutual Friend (1865)Description / Buy at Amazon
No Thoroughfare (With: Wilkie Collins) (1867)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

with Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide Anne Procter
The Black Veil (1836)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Holly Tree Inn (1850)Description / Buy at Amazon
A House to Let (With: Wilkie Collins,Elizabeth Gaskell,Adelaide Anne Procter) (1858)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Haunted House (1859)Description / Buy at Amazon
Doctor Marigold (1866)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Magic Fishbone (1867)Description / Buy at Amazon
George Silverman's Explanation (1868)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Sketches by Boz (1836)Description / Buy at Amazon
Master Humphrey's Clock, Volume 2 (1841)Description / Buy at Amazon
To Be Read at Dusk (1852)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Poor Traveller / Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn (1858)Description / Buy at Amazon
Reprinted Pieces (1861)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Complete Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens (1866)Description / Buy at Amazon
Mudfog and Other Papers Contributed to Bentley's Miscellany (1880)Description / Buy at Amazon
Select Short Fiction (1976)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Signalman & Other Ghost Stories (1984)Description / Buy at Amazon
Hunted Down (2016)Description / Buy at Amazon
Night Walks and Other Essays (2020)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Collections

Three Ghost Stories (1998)Description / Buy at Amazon
Wicked Wit of Charles Dickens (With: Shelley Klein) (2002)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Piper S. Books

Tables Games (By: Richard Dawson) (0)Description / Buy at Amazon
Great Expectations (1861)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dress Rehearsal (By: Lorna Hill) (1959)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Dictionary Of Famous Quotations (By: Robin Hyman) (1967)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Sixth Seal (By: Mary Wesley) (1969)Description / Buy at Amazon
Haphazard House (By: Mary Wesley) (1983)Description / Buy at Amazon
Rachel and the Angel and Other Stories (By: robert-westall) (1984)Description / Buy at Amazon
Boris the Tomato (By: AlexMartin) (1984)Description / Buy at Amazon
Journey To The Volcano (By: Rose Tremain) (1985)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Vampire in the Computer/the Ghost's Playground (By: Harry Gilbert) (1986)Description / Buy at Amazon
There's a Wolf in My Pudding, Twelve Twisted, Tortured, Grim and Gruesome, Tall and Terrible Tales (By: David Henry Wilson) (1986)Description / Buy at Amazon
On My Honor / On My Honour (By: Marion Dane Bauer) (1986)Description / Buy at Amazon
Remember Me to Harold Square (By: Paula Danziger) (1987)Description / Buy at Amazon
Tomorrow Is a Stranger (By: Geoffrey Trease) (1987)Description / Buy at Amazon
How to Be Cool (By: Philip Pullman) (1987)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dr. Chill (By: Thomas Hoobler) (1987)Description / Buy at Amazon
Willow (By: Cathy East Dubowski) (1988)Description / Buy at Amazon
Yucky Ducky (By: David Henry Wilson) (1988)Description / Buy at Amazon
Blitzcat (By: Robert Westall) (1989)Description / Buy at Amazon
Everyone Else's Parents Said Yes (By: Paula Danziger) (1989)Description / Buy at Amazon
Gander of the Yard (By: David Henry Wilson,Jonathan Allen) (1989)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dear Mum You're Ruining My Life (By: Jean Van Leeuwen) (1989)Description / Buy at Amazon
Make Like a Tree and Leave (By: Paula Danziger) (1990)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Promise (By: Robert Westall) (1990)Description / Buy at Amazon
Yaxley's Cat (By: Robert Westall) (1991)Description / Buy at Amazon
Starchild and Witchfire (By: David Henshall) (1991)Description / Buy at Amazon
Ghosts and Journeys (By: Robert Westall) (1992)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Anthologies

The Lock and Key Library Classic Mystery and Detective Stories(1909)Description / Buy at Amazon
Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror(1931)Description / Buy at Amazon
World's Great Mystery Stories(1943)Description / Buy at Amazon
Echoes Of Terror(1980)Description / Buy at Amazon
Alfred Hitchcock's Fatal Attractions(1983)Description / Buy at Amazon
Ghost Stories(1986)Description / Buy at Amazon
Great Law and Order Stories(1990)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Little Book of Horrors: Tiny Tales of Terror(1992)Description / Buy at Amazon
H.P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon
100 Dastardly Little Detective Stories(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon
100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon
Thrillers(1994)Description / Buy at Amazon
Children's Christmas Stories and Poems(1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
Classic Sea Stories(1996)Description / Buy at Amazon
Classic Victorian & Edwardian Ghost Stories(1996)Description / Buy at Amazon
Writing New York(1998)Description / Buy at Amazon
Tales of Terror: Between Heaven and the Earth(2002)Description / Buy at Amazon
The World's Greatest Horror Stories(2004)Description / Buy at Amazon
50 Classic Novellas(2011)Description / Buy at Amazon
London Stories(2013)Description / Buy at Amazon
Round the Christmas Fire(2013)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Phantom Coach(2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
That Glimpse of Truth(2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Chilling Ghost Stories(2015)Description / Buy at Amazon
Fireside Ghost Stories for Christmas Eve(2015)Description / Buy at Amazon
Best Ghost Short Stories 1850-1899(2016)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories: Volume 2(2016)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Greatest Books of All Time #4(2017)Description / Buy at Amazon
Writers: Their Lives and Works(2018)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Greatest Ghost and Horror Stories Ever Written: volume 3(2019)Description / Buy at Amazon
30 Eternal Masterpieces of Humorous Stories(2019)Description / Buy at Amazon
30 Occult & Supernatural Masterpieces You Have to Read Before You Die(2019)Description / Buy at Amazon
Victorian Anthologies of Classic Spectral Stories to Chill and Thrill the Senses(2020)Description / Buy at Amazon
Terrifying Ghosts Short Stories(2021)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Dover Anthology of Classic Christmas Stories(2023)Description / Buy at Amazon

The most popular novelist in English literature, Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 at the Commercial Road Landport, Portsea in Hampshire. His father, John Dickens was a clerk in the navy pay office. It was not easy for him to make both ends meet so he incurred debts and after struggling with them for many years, he finally shifted to Chatham when Charles was nine years of age.

It was in Chatham that he started his early schooling. He was a devout reader and preferred to gruel himself up in a corner with books rather than taking part in the mildest of physical activity. He lived in harmony for some years but soon the days of happiness came to an end. His father was arrested for non-payment of debts and sentenced for short term imprisonment.

It was under the stress of such financial conditions that Charles had to leave the school at the age of twelve. He had a find a job in the blacking factory and it was really painful to see such a promising young man working from dawn to dusk for few pennies. He was, however, relieved from this suffering when he received a small legacy from one of his relatives. His father was also set free and Charles Dickens joined Wellington House Academy at the age of sixteen. It was a brutal place and its principal was famous as the most ignorant and tyrant person. He did not learn anything at this place but the experience he gained at the school proved a fruitful source in writing Nicholas Nickleby. This novel exposes the weakness of Yorkshire schools and ignorant teachers who were in charge of young students. In 2002, director Douglas McGrath adopted this novel in the movie and its cast featured Anne Hathaway, Charlie Hunnam, and Jamie Bell.

He left the school in disgust and again went to work, but this time as a clerk in a lawyer’s office. He also began to study shorthand in order to achieve success in his career as a reporter. His progress was swift and he became a parliamentary reporter in 1830. It was largely during this period that he gained his extraordinary knowledge of London, which he used effectively in his sketches of London life.

Charles Dickens began his career as a writer with Sketches by Boz in 1836. It was a series dealing with London life in the manner and style of Leigh Hunt. However, the earliest of Charles Dicken’s work that caught appreciation was Pickwick Papers which was published in 1836. It was written at the suggestion of an editor, for serial publication. It contains some seventy distinct situations and more than four hundred characters, some of them coming on the stage only once to win for them an immortal place in our hearts.

Charles Dickens also traveled to the United States at the invitation of Washington Irving. He left for the United States in 1841 and was warmly received by the people there. But soon their praised was damped when they learned that he had strongly criticized slavery system in the United States in his Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes. But this controversy died out when he made his second visit to the US in 1867. It was after this period that he wrote David Copperfield and Great Expectations. These two novels were also made into movies and Television series. Great Expectation was first released in 1946 and David Copperfield in 1999.

Charles Dickens is the representative of the Victorian London- the England of 1820s and 30s. He presented the capital city in all its colors, its shops, offices, slums and people. He knew the spirit of his people and gave them exactly what they wanted. His novels were not written, they were born. They were created by him for his people. He is just like the Ancient Mariner of S.T. Coleridge.

Further, his novels are also remarkable for preposterously rhetoric style and heavy moralizing. The middle class morality is always an important element of his novels. Thomas Hardy’s Tess was greeted with abuses when she tried to break the taboos but Charles Dickens prefer to stick to the public taste. Sex is carefully dramatized as it was a taboo in victorian age. It was the period of the readers who did not wish to go beyond their moral boundaries and Charles Dickens was perfectly aware of this.

The plots of his novels lack unity and are coherent. They are marked with diffuseness and discursiveness. There are elaborate passages of description and redundant detail which don’t seem to have a bearing on the development of the story. In other words, his novels are like satchel in which different objects of varying sizes and shapes have been stuffed. They contain something for everybody and the part you don’t like you can more or less ignore.
As a matter of fact, Charles Dickens was more interested in characters than in manners. Hin interest was in men and women rather than incidents. So characters are the main thing in his novels and plots are subordinate to characters. He perfectly agreed with the idea that a story should begin with characters and not with the plot. Once he had invented his characters and let them loose, he believed strongly that it was their business to tell the tale. This was the base of his novels and he developed into an art which he alone could master.

Charles Dickens died in 1870 and over his unfinished Edwin Drood and was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. “No death since 1866,” wrote Carlyle to his wife, “has fallen on me with such a stroke. The good, the gentle, high gifted, over friendly and noble Dickens-every inch of him an honest man.”

The greatest merit of Dickens’ stories is that he brought to the service of literature an imagination, which though never poetic was elastic to the highest degree and with the help of this imagination, he created a dreamland which had a distinct reality of its own. It was only achieved by Shelley and Coleridge before him.

Book Series In Order » Authors » Charles Dickens

One Response to “Charles Dickens”

  1. muhammad salama: 7 years ago

    Brilliant Site. It makes reading more enjoyable as you can relate the writer’s development in style as you follow his/her novels. Keep up the good work!

    Reply

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