From their first appearance in print, Dickens's fictions immediately migrated into other media, and particularly, in his own time, to the stage. Since then Dickens has continuously, apparently inexhaustibly, functioned as the wellspring for a robust mini-industry, sourcing plays, films, television specials and series, operas, new novels and even miniature and model villages. If in his lifetime he was justly called 'The Inimitable', since his death he has become just the reverse: the Infinitely Imitable. The essays in this volume, all appearing within the past twenty years, cover the full...

'No words can express the secret agony of my soul'. Dickens's tantalising hint alluding to his time at Warren's Blacking Factory remains a gnomic statement until Forster's biography after Dickens's death. Such a revelation partly explains the dominance of biography in early Dickens criticism; Dickens's own childhood was understood to provide the material for his writing, particularly his representation of the child and childhood. Yet childhood in Dickens continues to generate a significant level of critical interest. This volume of essays traces the shifting importance given to childhood in...

Dickens's relationship to cities is part of his modernity and his enduring fascination. How he thought about, grasped and conceptualised the rapidly expanding and anonymous urban scene are all fascinating aspects of a critical debate which, starting virtually from Dickens's own time, has become more and more active and questioning of the significance of that new thing, the unknown and unknowable, city. Although Dickens was influenced by several European and American cities, the most significant city for Dickens was London, the city he knew as a boy in the 1820s and which developed in his...

This volume of essays provides a selection of leading contemporary scholarship which situates Dickens in a global perspective. The articles address four main areas: Dickens's reception outside Britain and North America; his intertextual relations with and influence upon writers from different parts of the world; Dickens as traveller; and the presence throughout his fiction and journalism of subjects, such as race and empire, that extend beyond the national contexts in which his work is usually considered. Written by leading researchers from diverse countries and cultures, this is an...

This volume places Dickens at the centre of a dynamic and expanding Victorian print world and tells the story of his career against a background of options available to him. The collection describes a world animated by outpourings of print materials: books, serials, newspapers, periodicals, libraries, paintings and prints, parodies and plagiarisms, censorship, advertising, as well as theatre and other entertainment, and celebrity. It also shows this period as driven by a growing and more literate population, and undergirded by a general conviction that writing was a crucial component of...

This volume of essays examines Dickens's complex representations of sexuality and gender as well as his use of gender ideologies and sexual and gender differences over the course of his literary career, from his first sketches and early novels to his late works of fiction. The essays approach gender issues in Dickens's writing by focusing on a number of topics: his treatment of gender ideals and transgressions; the intersections and displacements among gender, class and race; the ties between gender and the body, and among gender, voice and language; his depiction of the homosocial and the...