Which charles dickens book is the best

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.

Selected Journalism 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 , 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. Sketches By Boz Again, journalism, but journalism morphing into the fiction. 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. The novel was the last that Dickens completed, and is a savage indictment of the corrupting power of money. When John Harmon dies and his estranged son is also presumed dead, his riches pass to his servants Mr and Mrs Boffin. Adapted into a TV series, stage play and a film starring Kermit the Frog, Charles Dickens' much-loved festive novella is a festive staple and the perfect Christmas read.

A celebration of Christmas, a tale of redemption, and a critique on Victorian society, it follows the miserly, penny-pinching Ebenezer Scrooge who views Christmas as 'humbug'.

It is only through a series of eerie, life-changing visits from the ghost of his deceased business partner Marley and the spirits of Christmas past, present and future that Scrooge begins to see the error of his ways. Gradgrind then reflects on the repercussions of his guidance. Readers are introduced to the life of Amy Dorrit, who was born and raised in London's Marshalsea prison due to her father's imprisonment for debt.

But somehow, the Dorrits rise out of their misfortune, becoming a family of wealth. This historical novel is set before and during the French Revolution in which a doctor named Manette is imprisoned for 18 years in Bastille. At the end of his sentence, he moves to London to live with the daughter he's never met. This coming-of-age novel follows the life of an orphan named Pip, who is adopted into the home of a blacksmith. Dickens makes many interesting points about social strata, classism, the industrial revolution, and conflicts of morality, making Great Expectations one of the most celebrated books in the Western canon.

Set between London and Paris at the time of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities is a biting commentary on the parallels between the events in France and life in London provided through the lives of several characters — primarily Dr Marnette and his daughter Lucie, barrister Sydney Carton, nobleman Charles Darnay, and revolutionaries Monsieur and Madame Defarge. Told in part by an omniscient narrator and in part by the protagonist, Esther Summerson, the plot revolves around a long-running legal case entitled Jarndyce vs Jarndyce.

Seminal for its unfiltered portrayal of the harsh treatment which orphans faced in England at the time, Oliver Twist is the story of the titular young orphan: his childhood in a workhouse, his subsequent apprenticeship with an undertaker, his escape to London, and finally his acquaintance with the Artful Dodger and the ring of adolescent pickpockets of which the Dodger is a part. The story follows Ebenezer Scrooge, a spiteful old man lacking in Christmas spirit, as he is visited by four ghosts— the ghost of his former business partner and the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come— who guide Scrooge through remembrances of years gone by and help him to become more kindhearted and to join in the positive spirit of Christmas.

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