This study of Dickens's career as a professional writer uses a range of material to describe and analyze the ways in which his work can be seen as a form of literary production. It thus offers a challenge to traditional accounts which stress the private nature of Dickens's genius. Smith focuses on the communal nature of Dickens's achievement in his struggles with publishers, the expectations of a vast public, and the demands of serialization.

Dickens and the dream of cinema seeks to dissolve the barriers between literary and film studies. Grahame Smith, a major Dickens scholar who has also taught, researched and published in the field of film, suggests that Dickens's work plays a seminal role in the emergence of cinema. Taking his cue from Walter Benjamin's concept of each epoch dreaming the epoch that is to follow, Smith argues that Dickens's novels can be regarded as proto-filmic in the detail of their language as well as their larger formal structures. This possibility arises from Dickens's creative engagement with the city as...