“What are Charles Dickens’s Best Books?” We looked at all of Dickens’s authored bibliography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!

We took all of the books written by Charles Dickens and looked at his Goodreads, Amazon, and LibraryThing scores, ranking them against one another to see which books came out on top. The books are ranked in our list below based on which titles have the highest overall score between all 3 review sites in comparison with all of the other books by the same author. The process isn’t super scientific and in reality, most books aren’t “better” than other books as much as they are just different. That being said, we do enjoy seeing where our favorites landed, and if you aren’t familiar with the author at all, the rankings can help you see what books might be best to start with.

The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

The Top Book’s Of Charles Dickens

39 ) Reprinted Pieces

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 39
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 34

THERE was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child too, and his constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water.

38 ) The Village Coquettes

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 36
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 35

37 ) Boots at the Holly-tree Inn: And Other Stories

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 36
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 32

“Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn” was first published by Charles Dickens in 1855, and is the story of a traveller who finds himself snowed in for a week at the Holly-Tree Inn. he entertains himself by recording the stories he hears from the other lodgers and staff.

36 ) The Strange Gentleman

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 30
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 35

35 ) The Complete Poems of Charles Dickens

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 26
• Amazon: 33
• LibraryThing: 35

34 ) The Battle of Life: A Love Story

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 34
• Amazon: 28
• LibraryThing: 28

The Battle of Life: A Love Story is a novella by Charles Dickens, 1st published in 1846. It’s the 4th of his five “Christmas Books”, coming after The Cricket on the Hearth, followed by The Haunted Man & the Ghost’s Bargain. The setting is an English village that stands on the site of a historic battle. Some characters refer to the battle as a metaphor for the struggles of life, hence the title.

33 ) The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 35
• Amazon: 22
• LibraryThing: 31

This volume contains Charles Dickens s 1844 short story “The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In.” Published one year after “A Christmas Carol” and one year before “The Cricket on the Hearth,”

32 ) Letters of Charles Dickens to Wilkie Collins

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 36
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 13

31 ) The Mudfog Papers

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 29
• Amazon: 32
• LibraryThing: 20

Dickens parodies the proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science with these records of “The Mudfog Society for the Advancement of Everything” and its delightful professors Snore, Doze, and Wheezy. Originally published monthly in Bentley’s Miscellany from 1837-38, “The Mudfog Papers” makes use of Parliamentary reports, memoirs, and posthumous paper Dickens parodies the proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science with these records of “The Mudfog Society for the Advancement of Everything” and its delightful professors Snore, Doze, and Wheezy.

30 ) Master Humphrey’s Clock

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 32
• Amazon: 26
• LibraryThing: 22

29 ) Sunday Under Three Heads

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 26
• Amazon: 21
• LibraryThing: 32

28 ) Pictures from Italy

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 22
• Amazon: 31
• LibraryThing: 25

A delightful travelogue in the unique style of one of the greatest writers in the English language, the Penguin Classics edition of Charles Dickens’s Pictures from Italy is edited with notes and an introduction by and notes by Kate Flint. In 1844, Charles Dickens took a break from novel writing to travel through Italy for almost a year and Pictures from Italy is an illuminating account of his experiences there. He presents the country like a magic-lantern show, as vivid images ceaselessly appear before his – and his readers’ – eyes. Italy’s most famous sights are all to be found here – St Peter’s in Rome, Naples with Vesuvius smouldering in the background, the fairytale buildings and canals of Venice – but Dickens’s chronicle is not simply that of a tourist. Avoiding preconceptions and stereotypes, he portrays a nation of great contrasts: between grandiose buildings and squalid poverty, and between past and present, as he observes everyday life beside ancient monuments. Combining thrilling travelogue with piercing social commentary, Pictures from Italy is a revealing depiction of an exciting and disquieting journey. In her introduction, Kate Flint discusses nineteenth-century travel writing, and Dickens’s ideas about perception, memory and Italian politics. This edition also includes a chronology, further reading, notes and an appendix. Charles Dickens is one of the best-loved novelists in the English language, whose 200th anniversary was celebrated in 2012. His most famous books, including Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and The Pickwick Papers, have been adapted for stage and screen and read by millions. If you enjoyed Pictures from Italy, you might like Dickens’s American Notes, also available in Penguin Classics.

26 ) Sketches of Young Couples

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 25
• Amazon: 29
• LibraryThing: 16

26 ) Speeches, Letters and Sayings

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 1
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 35

25 ) The Uncommercial Traveller

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 24
• Amazon: 22
• LibraryThing: 23

No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me. No round of beef or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me, no pigeon-pie is especially made for me, no hotel-advertisement is personally addressed to me, no hotel-room tapestried with great-coats and railway wrappers is set apart for me, no house of public entertainment in the United Kingdom greatly cares for my opinion of its brandy or sherry.

24 ) Hard Times: For These Times

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 23
• Amazon: 18
• LibraryThing: 26

Longman’s new Cultural Editions Series, Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, edited by Jeff Nunokawa, includes Books 1-3 of Hard Times and contextual materials on the age of Dickens.

23 ) The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 20
• Amazon: 24
• LibraryThing: 21

Charles Dickens’s final, unfinished novel, and one that has puzzled readers and inspired writers since its publication, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is edited with an introduction by David Paroissien in Penguin Classics. Edwin Drood is contracted to marry orphan Rosa Bud when he comes of age, but when they find that duty has gradually replaced affection, they agree to break off the engagement. Shortly afterwards, in the middle of a storm on Christmas Eve, Edwin disappears, leaving nothing behind but some personal belongings and the suspicion that his jealous uncle John Jasper, madly in love with Rosa, is the killer. And beyond this presumed crime there are further intrigues: the dark opium dens of the sleepy cathedral town of Cloisterham, and the sinister double life of Choirmaster Jasper, whose drug-fuelled fantasy life belies his respectable appearance. Dickens died before completing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, leaving its tantalising mystery unsolved and encouraging successive generations of readers to turn detective.

21 ) The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, A Fancy for Christmas-Time

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 33
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 30

In this story, Dickens narrates the hair-raising experiences of a professor. As the protagonist dwells on his past sorrows and mistakes, a phantom visits him. It offers him a bizarre escape from painful recollections of yesteryear by offering to eradicate his memory. On seeing the professor turn into a man devoid of emotions, the reader realizes how empty one becomes without a past.

21 ) The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 14
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 35

Few first novels have created as much popular excitement as The Pickwick Papers–-a comic masterpiece that catapulted its 24-year-old author to immediate fame. Readers were captivated by the adventures of the poet Snodgrass, the lover Tupman, the sportsman Winkle &, above all, by that quintessentially English Quixote, Mr Pickwick, & his cockney Sancho Panza, Sam Weller. From the hallowed turf of Dingley Dell Cricket Club to the unholy fracas of the Eatanswill election, via the Fleet debtor’s prison, characters & incidents sprang to life from Dickens’s pen, to form an enduringly popular work of ebullient humour & literary invention.

20 ) Sketches by Boz

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 19
• Amazon: 29
• LibraryThing: 15

19 ) Sketches of Young Gentlemen

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 31
• Amazon: 4
• LibraryThing: 27

17 ) American Notes: For General Circulation

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 21
• Amazon: 24
• LibraryThing: 14

A fascinating account of nineteenth-century America sketched with Charles Dickens’s characteristic wit and charm When Charles Dickens set out for America in 1842 he was the most famous man of his day to travel there – curious about the revolutionary new civilization that had captured the English imagination. His frank and often humorous descriptions cover everything from his comically wretched sea voyage to his sheer astonishment at the magnificence of the Niagara Falls, while he also visited hospitals, prisons and law courts and found them exemplary. But Dickens’s opinion of America as a land ruled by money, built on slavery, with a corrupt press and unsavoury manners, provoked a hostile reaction on both sides of the Atlantic. American Notes is an illuminating account of a great writer’s revelatory encounter with the New World. In her introduction,

17 ) A Child’s History of England

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 18
• Amazon: 18
• LibraryThing: 23

If you look at a Map of the World, you will see, in the left-hand upper corner of the Eastern Hemisphere, two Islands lying in the sea. They are England and Scotland, and Ireland. England and Scotland form the greater part of these Islands. Ireland is the next in size. The little neighbouring islands, which are so small upon the Map as to be mere dots, are chiefly little bits of Scotland, –broken off, I dare say, in the course of a great length of time, by the power of the restless water…

16 ) The Frozen Deep

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 26
• Amazon: 27
• LibraryThing: 1

Exchanging vows of love with sailor Frank Aldersley the night before his departure, Clara Burnham is haunted by the memory of Richard Wardour, and his mistaken belief that they will one day marry. With her gift of ‘Second Sight’, Clara foresees terrible tragedy ahead and is racked by guilt. Allied to two different ships, the two men at first have no cause to meet — until disaster strikes and they find themselves united in a battle for survival. It cannot be long before they discover the nature of their rivalry, and the hot-tempered Wardour must choose how to take his revenge. Based on the doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, and originally performed as a play starring both Collins and Dickens, ‘The Frozen Deep’ is a dramatic tale of vengeance and self-sacrifice which went on to inspire the character of Sydney Carton in Charles Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.

15 ) The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 4
• Amazon: 18
• LibraryThing: 29

John Peerybingle, a carrier, lives with his young wife Dot, their baby boy and their nanny Tilly Slowboy. A cricket chirps on the hearth and acts as a guardian angel to the family. One day a mysterious elderly stranger comes to visit and takes up lodging at Peerybingle’s house for a few days. The life of the Peerybingles intersects with that of Caleb Plummer, a poor toymaker employed by the miser Mr. Tackleton. Caleb has a blind daughter Bertha, and a son Edward, who travelled to South America and is thought to be dead. The miser Tackleton is now on the eve of marrying Edward’s sweetheart, May, but she does not love Tackleton. Tackleton tells John Peerybingle that his wife Dot has cheated on him, and shows him a clandestine scene in which Dot embraces the mysterious lodger; the latter, who is in disguise, is actually a much younger man than he seems. John is cut to the heart over this as he loves his wife dearly, but decides after some deliberations to relieve his wife of their marriage contract. In the end, the mysterious lodger is revealed to be none other than Edward who has returned home in disguise. Dot shows that she has indeed been faithful to John. Edward marries May hours before she is scheduled to marry Tackleton. However, Tackleton’s heart is melted by the festive cheer (in a manner reminiscent of Ebenezer Scrooge), and he surrenders May to her true love.

14 ) The Old Curiosity Shop

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 16
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 19

The archetypal Victorian melodrama, as heartfelt and moving today as when it was first published, Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop is edited with notes and an introduction by Norman Page in Penguin Classics. Little Nell Trent lives in the quiet gloom of the old curiosity shop with her ailing grandfather, for whom she cares with selfless devotion. But when they are unable to pay their debts to the stunted, lecherous and demonic money-lender Daniel Quilp, the shop is seized and they are forced to flee, thrown into a shadowy world in which there seems to be no safe haven. Dickens’s portrayal of the innocent, tragic Nell made The Old Curiosity Shop an instant bestseller that captured the hearts of the nation, even as it was criticised for its sentimentality by figures such as Oscar Wilde. Yet alongside the story’s pathos are some of Dickens’s greatest comic and grotesque creations: the ne’er-do-well Dick Swiveller, the mannish lawyer Sally Brass, the half-starved ‘Marchioness’ and the lustful, loathsome Quilp himself.

13 ) Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 15
• Amazon: 13
• LibraryThing: 18

Set against the backdrop of the Gordon Riots of 1780, Barnaby Rudge is a story of mystery and suspense which begins with an unsolved double murder and goes on to involve conspiracy, blackmail, abduction and retribution. Through the course of the novel fathers and sons become opposed, apprentices plot against their masters and Protestants clash with Catholics on the streets. And, as London erupts into riot, Barnaby Rudge himself struggles to escape the curse of his own past. With its dramatic descriptions of public violence and private horror, its strange secrets and ghostly doublings, Barnaby Rudge is a powerful, disturbing blend of historical realism and Gothic melodrama.

11 ) The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 10
• Amazon: 13
• LibraryThing: 9

I shall never regret doing as I have—never, if I starve or beg in consequence’ When Nicholas Nickleby is left penniless after his father’s death, he appeals to his wealthy uncle to help him find work and to protect his mother and sister. But Ralph Nickleby proves both hard-hearted and unscrupulous, and Nicholas finds himself forced to make his own way in the world. His adventures gave Dickens the opportunity to portray an extraordinary gallery of rogues and eccentrics: Wackford Squeers, the tyrannical headmaster of Dotheboys Hall, a school for unwanted boys; the slow-witted orphan Smike, rescued by Nicholas; and the gloriously theatrical Mr and Mrs Crummles and their daughter, the ‘infant phenonenon’. Like many of Dickens’s novels, Nicholas Nickleby is characterised by his outrage at cruelty and social injustice, but it is also a flamboyantly exuberant work, revealing his comic genius at its most unerring. Mark Ford’s introduction compares Nicholas Nickleby to eighteenth-century picaresque novels, and examines Dickens’s criticism of the ‘Yorkshire Schools’, his social satire and use of language.

11 ) The Life of Our Lord: As written for his children

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 4
• Amazon: 11
• LibraryThing: 17

In this charming, simple retelling of the life of Jesus Christ, adapted from the Gospel of St. Luke, Dickens hoped to teach his young children about religion and faith. Author: Charles DickensFormat: 128 pages, HardcoverPublisher: Simon Schuster (November 9, 1999) ISBN: 978-0684865379

9 ) Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 9
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 6

Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens’s story of a powerful man whose callous neglect of his family triggers his professional and personal downfall, showcases the author’s gift for vivid characterization and unfailingly realistic description. As Jonathan Lethem contends in his Introduction, Dickens’s “genius . . . is at one with the genius of the form of the novel itself: Dickens willed into existence the most capacious and elastic and versatile kind of novel that could be, one big enough for his vast sentimental yearnings and for every impulse and fear and hesitation in him that countervailed those yearnings too. Never parsimonious and frequently contradictory, he always gives us everything he can, everything he’s planned to give, and then more.”

9 ) Great Expectations

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 16
• Amazon: 4
• LibraryThing: 10

In what may be Dickens’s best novel, humble, orphaned Pip is apprenticed to the dirty work of the forge but dares to dream of becoming a gentleman — and one day, under sudden and enigmatic circumstances, he finds himself in possession of “great expectations.” In this gripping tale of crime and guilt, revenge and reward, the compelling characters include Magwitch, the fearful and fearsome convict; Estella, whose beauty is excelled only by her haughtiness; and the embittered Miss Havisham, an eccentric jilted bride.

8 ) The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 12
• Amazon: 4
• LibraryThing: 11

While writing Martin Chuzzlewit – his sixth novel – Dickens declared it ‘immeasurably the best of my stories.’ He was already famous as the author of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. Set partly in America, which Dickens had visited in 1842, the novel includes a searing satire on the United States. Martin Chuzzlewit is the story of two Chuzzlewits, Martin and Jonas, who have inherited the characteristic Chuzzlewit selfishness. It contrasts their diverse fates of moral redemption and worldly success for one, with increasingly desperate crime for the other. This powerful black comedy involves hypocrisy, greed and blackmail, as well as the most famous of Dickens’s grotesques, Mrs Gamp.

7 ) Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 11
• Amazon: 4
• LibraryThing: 11

Dickens attacks the modern workhouse with a sort of inspired simplicity as of a boy in a fairy tale who had wandered about, sword in hand, looking for ogres and who had found an indisputable ogre. All the other people of his time are attacking things because they are bad economics or because they are bad politics, or because they are bad science; he alone is attacking things because they are bad. … Oliver Twist is not pathetic because he is a pessimist. Oliver Twist is pathetic because he is an optimist. The whole tragedy of [him asking for more] is in the fact that he does expect the universe to be kind to him, that he does believe that he is living in a just world.

6 ) A Tale of Two Cities

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 13
• Amazon: 4
• LibraryThing: 8

Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; — the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!’ After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror, and they soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.

5 ) Little Dorrit

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 7
• Amazon: 11
• LibraryThing: 6

A novel of serendipity, of fortunes won and lost, and of the spectre of imprisonment that hangs over all aspects of Victorian society, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit is edited with an introduction by Stephen Wall in Penguin Classics. When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years abroad, he takes a kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother’s seamstress, and in the affairs of Amy’s father, William Dorrit, a man of shabby grandeur, long imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea prison. As Arthur soon discovers, the dark shadow of the prison stretches far beyond its walls to affect the lives of many, from the kindly Mr Panks, the reluctant rent-collector of Bleeding Heart Yard, and the tipsily garrulous Flora Finching, to Merdle, an unscrupulous financier, and the bureaucratic Barnacles in the Circumlocution Office. A masterly evocation of the state and psychology of imprisonment, Little Dorrit is one of the supreme works of Dickens’s maturity.

4 ) David Copperfield

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 8
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 4

David Copperfield is the story of a young man’s adventures on his journey from an unhappy & impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; the eternally humble yet treacherous Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora; & the magnificently impecunious Micawber, one of literature’s great comic creations.

3 ) A Christmas Carol, In Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 3
• Amazon: 4
• LibraryThing: 5

If I had my way, every idiot who goes around with Merry Christmas on his lips, would be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. Merry Christmas? Bah humbug!’ Charles Dickens’ ghostly tale of sour and stingy miser Ebenezer Scrooge has captivated readers, listeners and audiences for over 150 years.

2 ) Our Mutual Friend

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 2
• Amazon: 4
• LibraryThing: 3

A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, Our Mutual Friend revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap’s expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights “Noddy” Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes “the Golden Dustman.” Charles Dickens’s last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend encompasses the great themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveaux riches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt all who crave it. With its flavorful cast of characters and numerous subplots, Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens’s most complex—and satisfying—novels.

1 ) Bleak House

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 4
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 2

Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in 20 monthly installments between March 1852 and September 1853. It is held to be one of Dickens’s finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon. At the novel’s core is long-running litigation in England’s Court of Chancery, Jarndyce v Jarndyce, which has far-reaching consequences for all involved. The litigation, which already has taken many years and consumed between £60,000 and £70,000 in court costs, is emblematic of the failure of Chancery. Though Chancery lawyers and judges criticised Dickens’s portrait of Chancery as exaggerated and unmerited, his novel helped to spur an ongoing movement that culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s.

Charles Dickens’s Best Books

Charles Dickens Review Website Bibliography Rankings