Reading · Pilgrimage

Dickens & Company

The novels as they came out, dated by their first serial part. Between them come the books Dickens grew up on and the ones his contemporaries were publishing alongside him, each placed just before the novel it sheds most light on.

I read them in the Everyman’s Library hardback editions.

Progress

4.1% of pages read

Books finished

1 of 40

In progress

1

Pages read

960 of 23,520

Reading now

• Moll Flanders Defoe

  Page 159 of 338 · 47% · since August 3

Up next: Oliver Twist

• Dickens 20 books

  1 of 20 finished · 801 of 11,674 pages

• Influences 5 books

  0 of 5 finished · 159 of 2,873 pages

• Contemporaries 15 books

  0 of 15 finished · 0 of 8,973 pages

1. The Pickwick Papers 1836–1837
   Blurb

   “The Pickwick Papers constitute first and foremost a kind of wild promise, a pre-natal vision of all the children of Dickens.”

   Chesterton, 1911 · Appreciations and Criticisms

2. Influence Moll Flanders Defoe 1722
   Blurb

   “The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances, that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine, where the names and other circumstances of the person are concealed.”

   Defoe, the author’s preface, 1722 · Gutenberg

3. Oliver Twist 1837–1839
   Blurb

   “Relatively to the other works of Dickens Oliver Twist is not of great value, but it is of great importance.”

   Chesterton, 1911 · Appreciations and Criticisms

4. Influence Gulliver’s Travels Swift 1726
   Blurb

   “There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriffe, when any one affirmed a thing, to say it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it.”

   Swift, writing as “the Publisher to the Reader,” 1726 · Wikisource

5. Nicholas Nickleby 1838–1839
   Blurb

   “Mr. Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they should be deemed impossible.”

   Dickens, first-edition preface, 1839 · Wikisource

6. Influence Tom Jones Fielding 1749

   Dickens named a son Henry Fielding Dickens the year he began Copperfield.

   Blurb

   “I have been Tom Jones (a child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together.”

   Dickens, David Copperfield, 1850, of his own boyhood reading · Gutenberg

7. The Old Curiosity Shop 1840–1841
   Blurb

   “The real hero and heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop are of course Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness.”

   Chesterton, 1911 · Appreciations and Criticisms

8. Influence Tristram Shandy Sterne 1759–1767
   Blurb

   “I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles,—but much more so, when he laughs, it adds something to this Fragment of Life.”

   Sterne, dedication to Pitt, 1760 · Gutenberg

9. Barnaby Rudge 1841
   Blurb

   “No account of the Gordon Riots having been, to my knowledge, introduced into any Work of Fiction … I was led to project this Tale.”

   Dickens, first-edition preface, 1841 · Wikisource

10. Influence Rob Roy Scott 1817
    Blurb

    “For why? Because the good old rule / Sufficeth them; the simple plan, / That they should take who have the power, / And they should keep who can.”

    Wordsworth, “Rob Roy’s Grave,” the motto Scott set before the novel, 1817 · Gutenberg

11. Martin Chuzzlewit 1843–1844
    Blurb

    “The book shows Dickens at his highest power … Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp at once became recognised types of character.”

    Dictionary of National Biography, 1888 · Wikisource

12. A Christmas Carol 1843
    Blurb

    “I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.”

    Dickens, preface, December 1843 · Gutenberg

13. The Chimes 1844
    Blurb

    “I am in regular, ferocious excitement with the Chimes; get up at seven; have a cold bath before breakfast; and blaze away, wrathful and red-hot, until three o’clock or so.”

    Dickens, letter from Genoa, 1844, in Forster · Forster’s Life

14. The Cricket on the Hearth 1845
    Blurb

    “It would be a delicate and beautiful fancy for a Christmas book, making the Cricket a little household god—silent in the wrong and sorrow of the tale, and loud again when all went well and happy.”

    Dickens, letter, 1845, in Forster · Forster’s Life

15. The Battle of Life 1846
    Blurb

    “The dance of the sisters in that autumn orchard is of itself worth a dozen inferior tales, and their reunion at the close, and indeed all the serious parts, are beautiful.”

    Lord Jeffrey, letter on its publication, 1846, in Forster · Forster’s Life

16. Dombey and Son 1846–1848
    Blurb

    “I design to show Mr. D. with that one idea of the Son taking firmer and firmer possession of him, and swelling and bloating his pride to a prodigious extent.”

    Dickens, letter, 25 July 1846, in Forster · Forster’s Life

17. Contemporary Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847

    Published while Dombey was still coming out in parts.

    Blurb

    “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion.”

    Charlotte Brontë, preface to the second edition, 1847 · Gutenberg

18. Contemporary Vanity Fair Thackeray 1847–1848

    Dickens’s rival, serialized in the same months.

    Blurb

    “…the deep wants of the human heart … none of them could have studied its mysterious workings in any theatre to greater advantage than in the bright and airy pages of Vanity Fair.”

    Dickens, speech toasting Thackeray, 29 March 1858 · Speeches, Literary and Social

19. Contemporary Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847
    Blurb

    “Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.”

    Charlotte Brontë, preface to the 1850 edition, as quoted by A. Mary F. Robinson, 1883 · Wikisource

20. Contemporary Agnes Grey Anne Brontë 1847
    Blurb

    “All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.”

    Anne Brontë, its opening, 1847 · Gutenberg

21. Contemporary The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Anne Brontë 1848
    Blurb

    “I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.”

    Anne Brontë, preface to the second edition, 1848 · Gutenberg

22. The Haunted Man 1848
    Blurb

    “The hero is a great chemist, a lecturer at an old foundation, a man of studious philosophic habits, haunted with recollections of the past … and at last parting with that portion of himself which he thinks he can safely cast away.”

    Forster, 1872–74 · Forster’s Life

23. David Copperfield 1849–1850
    Blurb

    “No one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing.”

    Dickens, first-edition preface, October 1850 · Gutenberg

24. Contemporary Shirley Charlotte Brontë 1849
    Blurb

    “Something real, cool, and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.”

    Charlotte Brontë, its opening chapter, 1849 · Gutenberg

25. Bleak House 1852–1853
    Blurb

    “In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.”

    Dickens, first-edition preface, 1853 · Gutenberg

26. Contemporary Villette Charlotte Brontë 1853
    Blurb

    “I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.”

    George Eliot, letter, 15 February 1853 · George Eliot’s Life, vol. 1

27. Hard Times 1854
    Blurb

    “One or two passages of exquisite pathos and the rest sullen Socialism.”

    Macaulay, private comment, 1854, as quoted by Chesterton · Appreciations and Criticisms

28. Little Dorrit 1855–1857
    Blurb

    “If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the common experience of an Englishman.”

    Dickens, first-edition preface, 1857 · Gutenberg

29. Contemporary The Professor Charlotte Brontë 1857
    Blurb

    “I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs.”

    Charlotte Brontë, preface, written 1851 · Gutenberg

30. Contemporary Adam Bede George Eliot 1859
    Blurb

    “Dickens has written to me the noblest, most touching words about ‘Adam’—not hyperbolical compliments, but expressions of deep feeling.”

    George Eliot, letter, 26 July 1859 · George Eliot’s Life, vol. 2

31. A Tale of Two Cities 1859
    Blurb

    “I fancied a story of incident might be written … pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating their interest out of them.”

    Dickens, letter, 1859, in Forster · Forster’s Life

32. Contemporary The Woman in White Wilkie Collins 1859–1860

    Followed A Tale of Two Cities in All the Year Round.

    Blurb

    “This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.”

    Collins, its opening line, 1860 · Gutenberg

33. Contemporary The Mill on the Floss George Eliot 1860

    A childhood novel from the same year.

    Blurb

    “A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace.”

    George Eliot, its opening, 1860 · Gutenberg

34. Great Expectations 1860–1861
    Blurb

    “Such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me … I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner.”

    Dickens, letter, 1860, in Forster · Forster’s Life

35. Contemporary Silas Marner George Eliot 1861
    Blurb

    “It came to me first of all quite suddenly, as a sort of legendary tale, suggested by my recollection of having once, in early childhood, seen a linen-weaver with a bag on his back.”

    George Eliot, letter to John Blackwood, 24 February 1861 · George Eliot’s Life, vol. 2

36. Our Mutual Friend 1864–1865
    Blurb

    “Our Mutual Friend marks a happy return to the earlier manner of Dickens at the end of Dickens’s life. One might call it a sort of Indian summer of his farce.”

    Chesterton, 1911 · Appreciations and Criticisms

37. Contemporary The Moonstone Wilkie Collins 1868
    Blurb

    “If Coleridge had known ‘The Moonstone,’ he might well have given it a place beside ‘The Alchemist’ and ‘Tom Jones’ for ingenuity of plot.”

    Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 · Wikisource

38. The Mystery of Edwin Drood 1870

    Left unfinished at his death.

    Blurb

    “Pickwick was a work partly designed by others, but ultimately filled up by Dickens. Edwin Drood, the last book, was a book designed by Dickens, but ultimately filled up by others.”

    Chesterton, 1911 · Appreciations and Criticisms

39. Contemporary Middlemarch George Eliot 1871–1872
    Blurb

    “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.”

    George Eliot, its prelude, 1871 · Gutenberg

40. Contemporary Daniel Deronda George Eliot 1876
    Blurb

    “Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.”

    George Eliot, its opening, 1876 · Gutenberg