Author: Charles Dickens
First published: 1849-50, by Bradbury and Evans

WARNING: Plot spoiler

The year before he died, Dickens called this novel “his favorite child.” While it is not exactly mine, I can see why it was his. In David Copperfield, Dickens created some of the most memorable—if not the most memorable—characters in his entire career. Even Virginia Woolf, who had no great deal of admiration for Dickens, admitted that David Copperfield was a novel so memorable and influential, that the story and characters had become part of most peoples’ consciousness from the days before they could even read.

The full banquet of Dickensian characters is present here in fine form, and you cannot help but love them. It’s one of the reasons why David Copperfield, in conjunction with Great Expectations, is sometimes the novel I tell people to read if they’ve never read Dickens before. You meet some of Dickens’s most likable and hilarious characters: Aunt Betsy Trotwood, Clara Pegotty and her brother, Mr. Dick (“Have him measured for a suit of clothes directly”), the “volatile” Miss Mowcher, Mrs. Micawber, and of course, Mr. Wilkins Micawber. You also encounter some of Dickens’s darkest and unlikable creations: Rosa Dartle, Mr. and Mrs. Murdstone, James Steerforth, and the unctuous Uriah Heep and his mother, who hang “like two great bats” over the whole of the Wickfield house.

Dickens has been criticized through the years, and often rightly so, for developing “flat” (as opposed to “round”) characters. These distinctions were first put forth by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel. In that work, Forster uses Mrs. Micawber as the paradigmatic example of what a flat character is:

The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence such as “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.” There is Mrs. Micawber—she says she won’t desert Mr. Micawber, she doesn’t, and there she is.

Touché Mr. Forster! He’s right—and there she is—but we’ll take more of her and her kind any day.

There are also those characters—and certainly moments—in this novel that tend towards the round. Though I find the Victorian “angel of the house” ideology in David Copperfield nauseating at times, I think Dickens treats two scenes in particular with incredible skill and emotional poignancy. The first is the discovery of Emily’s elopement with Steerforth (Chapter 31, “A Greater Loss”), and the second is the death of Dora Copperfield (Chapter 53, “Another Retrospect”). In both of these scenes, which have the potential to become un-retractable train wrecks of sentimentality and melodrama, Dickens renders the emotional turbulence that informs these moments with great respect and tranquillity—almost reservation, as if these tragic occurrences were no less a part of the natural fabric of life than Mr. Micawber’s insolvency. Mr. Pegotty’s heartbreak is palpable; and Dora Copperfield’s apologies are enough to make any reader reflect on lifetimes filled with regret. Here then is the artist toiling away at his craft, proving that this most sentimental and melodramatic of writers was also a supreme journalist who chronicled with exactitude the nuances of the human heart.

Author: Charles Dickens
First Published: 1860-61, in All the Year Round

The two questions about Dickens that people most often ask me are “What is your favorite Dickens novel?” and “If I’ve never read a Dickens novel before, which one should I start with?” My answer to both is usually Great Expectations, though that answer tends to differ sometimes, depending on which day you ask me.

Written at the height of Dickens’s creative powers in 1861, Great Expectations contains all of the best in Dickens: hysterical and eccentric characters, painful, moving, and unforgettable episodes, love unspoiled and love unrequited, and most important of all, an incredible story. John Irving, another one of my heroes, has gone so far as to say that Great Expectations “has the most wonderful and perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language.” I think I have to agree with him, though if you pressed me to declare my favorite novel in the English language, Great Expectations might have to duke it out with Middlemarch.

Not only does Great Expectations contain my favorite story by Dickens, but it also contains my favorite paragraph in all of Dickens. Here it is:

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

The wisdom and the feeling of these words take my breath away every time I read this passage. Dickens is referring here to the day that Pip meets Estella—the day that forever changes his life and sets his expectations in motion. But take any day from your own life that holds special significance, good or bad, then extract it, and extrapolate on what would have happened for the rest of your life instead. The concept is really mind-boggling.

It is a shame that so many people form a bad opinion about this novel and about Dickens in general when they’re forced to read Great Expectations in high school—a time when people are often too distracted, rightfully, by adolescence to weather the book’s various demands. One of the great joys of Great Expectations though, is being able to rediscover it whenever you want. When you re-read Great Expectations as an adult, it’s a very different experience from plodding through that intimidating 400-pager that your teacher might have assigned to you in high school. And if you wait long enough to let your heart get broken once or twice, I can tell you that Great Expectations will speak to you with a power that no other book can claim.

Author: Charles Dickens
First published: 1852-53, by Bradbury and Evans

WARNING: Plot spoiler

Bleak House is Dickens’s great indictment on the Victorian legal system, but also his critique of a world that refuses to endorse love in anything but its most conventional and socially-acceptable forms. As in all of Dickens’s novels, there are many stories within Bleak House, but my favorite is the harrowing story of Lady Dedlock and her daughter Esther Summerson. Running alongside the ancient and irresolvable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the Dedlock/Esther Summerson plot is the story at the very center of the book—the story that gives the stagnant world of Bleak House not only its momentum, but an emotional force unparalleled in Dickens.

Lady Dedlock and Esther are dead to each other in the sense that neither one knows about the others’ true identity. Lady Dedlock (formerly not a lady at all, but the aptly named Honoria Barbary), believes her child to have died at birth, and Esther, ushered away to hide her mother’s disgrace (Lady Dedlock was not married when she had Esther), is never told what happened to her mother. (”I had never worn a black frock, that I could recollect. I had never been shown my mama’s grave.”) They go through life apart, unaware of each others’ existences, longing for each other all the while and suppressing their longing as the culture demands. (Esther grows up haunted by the bitter castigations of her godmother/aunt: “Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers.”)

One of my favorite scenes not just in Bleak House but in all of Dickens, is the reunion scene between Esther and Lady Dedlock. It is so riveting for the momentary joy Esther experiences and the calamity that shatters the moment, rendering the joy immediately tragic. Discovering who her mother is at last, Esther briefly peeks through an open window into her past; but the window slams shut in an instant when Lady Dedlock, the condemned prisoner of a stratified world, announces that she and Esther can never speak to each other again.

“My child, my child!” she said. “For the last time! These kisses for the last time! These arms upon my neck for the last time! We shall meet no more. To hope to do what I seek to do, I must be what I have been so long. Such is my reward and doom. If you hear of Lady Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered; think of your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask! Think that the reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable! And then forgive her, if you can; and cry to Heaven to forgive her, which it never can!”

Esther’s and Lady Dedlock’s story is a story of repeated deaths and births. Esther is born, but “dies” in childbirth, and the mother “dies” along with her. Esther is haunted by this dead mother throughout her life, until the dead mother comes back to life, only to “murder” herself and her daughter again. They continue apart, dead to each other once more, until their final reunion in chapter 59 of the novel, when Esther discovers Lady Dedlock’s disguised body at the gates of the poor man’s graveyard: “. . . it was my mother, cold and dead.”

The BBC’s 2005 production of Bleak House, starring Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, is one of my favorite literary adaptations of all time. Though the writers did alter many parts of the book (including, sadly, the excision of the greatest chase scene in all of English literature—Bucket’s pursuit of Lady Dedlock through the night), the attention to the mood, lighting, and themes of Dickens’s original could not be more faithful.

Author: Charles Dickens
First published: 1838-39, by Chapman and Hall

Nicholas Nickleby is not my favorite book by Dickens. In fact, it is one of my least favorite books by Dickens. But it is an extremely important book in Dickens’s career because, though he was already quite famous when it was first published in 1839, it was the book that in many ways made him an author.

At the time of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens was still writing almost exclusively under his pseudonym “Boz.” But with Nickleby, he started putting his real name to his work, and in the front of the first edition of the book his publishers, Chapman and Hall, provided an engraved portrait of the young and handsome author—the antecedent to the modern-day dust jacket photo. Nicholas Nickleby was also the first novel for which Dickens, after much negotiation, came away owning the exclusive copyright.

The story of Nicholas Nickleby is typical early Dickens stuff—a melodramatic hero too perfect and honorable to be believed, a family plagued by ruin, mercenary and lecherous villains, damsels in distress, the bucolic Eden of the countryside contrasted with the stink and soot of London. It is the brother volume to the more familiar Oliver Twist, which Dickens was writing for another publisher (Richard Bentley) at the very same time. It’s no coincidence that the two greatest and most famous Dickens stage adaptations—Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (1960) and David Edgars’s Nicholas Nickleby (1980)—are of these two fast-paced and episodic books from this particular time period.

Nicholas Nickleby is really like two novels. The first half is rambling and quixotic, reaching back to Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837), and the discursive traditions of the 18th century. The second half is more coherent and dramatic, demonstrating the roots of the elaborate and magnificent plots that Dickens would go on to create in his later novels. My favorite characters in Nicholas Nickleby are probably the Cheerbyle brothers, who appear magically in the middle of the book to save the day, and mark a kind of transition point in the novel. They are not memorable for their language or complexity, but rather for the ridiculous degree of benevolence that they bestow on all who cross their path. (Think Scrooge at the other end of the spectrum.) Their generosity is so absurd and unbelievable that you can’t help but come away from the book laughing, and laughing hard.