Charles Dickens Victorian Novels Reading Order

Complete Bleak House Book List

1. 1

   Bleak House

   Charles Dickens·1853·The novel — serialized in 20 monthly parts from March 1852 to September 1853; best read without rushing the early chapters that introduce the large cast, whose connections gradually become clear; the double narrative (Esther's first-person and the omniscient present-tense narrator) is one of the most innovative formal experiments in Victorian fiction.
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2. 2

   Great Expectations

   Charles Dickens·1861·Dickens's most perfectly structured novel — the orphan Pip, his mysterious patron, and Miss Havisham; the Dickens novel most commonly recommended for first-time readers and the one that best demonstrates his psychological range beneath the social comedy.
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3. 3

   Our Mutual Friend

   Charles Dickens·1865·Dickens's last completed novel — a satire of Victorian money-worship organized around the inheritance of a dust-heap fortune; darker and more experimental than the earlier novels, with the Thames as its central symbol; considered by Henry James the beginning of modern English fiction in its deliberate formal construction.
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4. 4

   Little Dorrit

   Charles Dickens·1857·Dickens's novel about the Marshalsea debtors' prison and the daughter born within its walls — his most explicitly political novel after Bleak House, attacking the Circumlocution Office (a satire of government bureaucracy) and the social world of finance speculation that collapsed in the 1857 crisis while the novel was being serialized.
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5. 5

   Middlemarch

   George Eliot·1872·Eliot's masterpiece about a provincial English town in the era of Reform — the most serious formal and moral competitor to Bleak House in the Victorian novel; where Dickens's social criticism is panoramic and satirical, Eliot's is intimate and sympathetic, but both are attempting a complete portrait of English society through the intersection of many stories and social levels.
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6. 6

   The Way We Live Now

   Anthony Trollope·1875·Trollope's satire of financial speculation and social corruption in 1870s England — the Trollope novel that most directly parallels Bleak House in its ambition to paint an entire social system through an interconnected large cast; organized around the fraudulent financier Augustus Melmotte, whose rise and fall exposes the moral bankruptcy of English society at every level.
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7. 7

   Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall Trilogy

   Hilary Mantel·2009·Mantel's novels about Tudor court politics are the finest contemporary British historical fiction and the works that most recall Bleak House in their interest in institutional power, the intersection of private life with historical process, and the technique of presenting a large cast of interconnected characters in close third-person while maintaining a panoramic social view.
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