![]() ![]() And, in recognition of how obsessive many Victorianists are about Dickens, one added that after debating his best novel, perhaps I’d be interested in curating a more esoteric discussion: Best Dickens character for a one night stand, or maybe which Dickens character you’d most like to have as your own child. ![]() Just about everyone I reached out to was game. I noted that of course there is no such thing as a singular best, and that really the exercise was meant to be fun. ![]() In June, I sent out emails to select scholars asking them if they’d be interested in choosing a novel and making their case. Searching for clarity, I decided to pose the question to a handful of leading Victorianists. Bleak House came out first, Great Expectations was last, yet those two titles occupied the top two spots when Time issued its own Top-10 Dickens List for the Dickens bicentennial. ![]() Chesterton thought Bleak House represented the mature peak of Dickens’s skill as a novelist, although he went on to remark, “We can say more or less when a human being has come to his full mental growth, even if we go so far as to wish that he had never come to it.” This past February, on the occasion of Dickens’s 200th birthday, The Guardian put together this mesmerizing chart ranking 12 of Dickens’s 16 novels on a scale of most to least Dickensian. What was Charles Dickens’s best novel? It depends whom you ask of course. ![]()
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