Charles Dickens
16 books by Charles Dickens to read free, each with its best passages and lines, and the best quotes from all of them below.
Where to start
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A Christmas Carol
A miserly moneylender is visited by four ghosts who help him see how to honor Christmas in his heart all year round.
29,218 words, about 2 hours
Then
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Great Expectations
An orphan boy living in Victorian England begins his life in extreme poverty and goes on to experience good fortune, love, rejection, wealth, and social challenges as he grows into adulthood.
185,035 words, about 13 hours
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A Tale of Two Cities
A family is reunited, added to, and then threatened to be torn apart by events arising from the French Revolution.
136,444 words, about 10 hours
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Oliver Twist
A poor boy, born and raised in a workhouse in Victorian England, falls into the control of a gang of heartless criminals.
157,841 words, about 11 hours
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David Copperfield
The semi-autobiographical tale of a young boy who rises up to become a successful novelist.
355,205 words, about 25 hours
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Bleak House
A young woman of uncertain parentage is taken in by a kindly guardian, while her fate and that of two other young people hinge on the outcome of an interminable legal case.
353,741 words, about 25 hours
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Little Dorrit
After returning home from a long period spent working in China, a man tries to assist a family forced to live in a debtor’s prison.
337,467 words, about 24 hours
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Our Mutual Friend
When the body of an unknown man is dragged from the river Thames, a series of complications involving the will of a wealthy man entangle the lives of several Londoners.
325,290 words, about 23 hours
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Nicholas Nickleby
A brother and sister, made destitute by the death of their father, struggle to succeed despite the callous indifference of their corrupt uncle.
323,986 words, about 23 hours
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The Pickwick Papers
An elderly gentleman and his friends travel around Britain and have a series of comic adventures.
300,520 words, about 21 hours
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The Old Curiosity Shop
A girl and her grandfather struggle through a life of poverty amidst a diverse cast of memorable characters in Victorian London.
217,728 words, about 15 hours
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Barnaby Rudge
A simple-minded young man and his pet raven are swept up in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780.
253,684 words, about 18 hours
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The Mystery of Edwin Drood
A young man mysteriously vanishes, and all the suspects are secretly in love with his fiancé.
96,260 words, about 7 hours
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Dombey and Son
A young woman grows up in a household where all of her father’s attention is on his son.
349,944 words, about 25 hours
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Martin Chuzzlewit
A young man is spurned by his wealthy grandfather and attempts to make it on his own.
337,425 words, about 24 hours
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Hard Times
A wealthy man in the industrial north of England raises his children on purely rational principles, with unfortunate results.
103,481 words, about 7 hours
Charles Dickens quotes
Marley was dead, to begin with.
My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.
You’d be in a blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!
Oliver and Nature fought out the point between them.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.
Has a dead man any use for money?
Thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love.
That punctual servant of all work, the sun, had just risen, and begun to strike a light on the morning of the thirteenth of May, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven, when Mr. Samuel Pickwick burst like another sun from his slumbers, threw open his chamber window, and looked out upon the world beneath.
“I am sure you will not do that,” said the little creature, “you are such a very old gentleman, and walk so slow yourself.”
Whether these, and many other stories of the like nature, were true or untrue, the Maypole was really an old house, a very old house, perhaps as old as it claimed to be, and perhaps older, which will sometimes happen with houses of an uncertain, as with ladies of a certain, age.
There is said to be a hidden skeleton in every house; but you thought there was none in mine, dear Ned.
Son, with his little fists curled up and clenched, seemed, in his feeble way, to be squaring at existence for having come upon him so unexpectedly.
Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there; but these were his enemies, the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all.
The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.
Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.
If ever anybody’s hair stood on end with terror, mine must have done so then. But, perhaps, nobody’s ever did?
Feelings! I have no time for them, no chance of them. I pass my whole life, miss, in turning an immense pecuniary Mangle.
Sevenpence-halfpenny’s worth per week is a good round diet for a child; a great deal may be got for sevenpence-halfpenny, quite enough to overload its stomach, and make it uncomfortable.
Reading paths
- English for learners: Intermediate Eight books for the reader who has the basics, easiest first: folk tales, Wilde, Sherlock Holmes, Dickens and the Panchatantra.