The fictional representation of the family has long been regarded as a Dickensian speciality; yet any close examination of his novels reveals a remarkable disjunction between his image as the quintessential celebrant of the hearth, and his interest in fractured families. Drawing on feminist and new historicist methodologies, Catherine Waters argues that Dickens' novels record a shift in notions of the family away from stress on the importance of lineage and blood toward a new ideal of domesticity assumed to be the natural form of the family.

The fictional representation of the family has long been regarded as a Dickensian speciality; yet any close examination of his novels reveals a remarkable disjunction between his image as the quintessential celebrant of the hearth, and his interest in fractured families. Drawing on feminist and new historicist methodologies, Catherine Waters argues that Dickens' novels record a shift in notions of the family away from stress on the importance of lineage and blood toward a new ideal of domesticity assumed to be the natural form of the family.

In 1850, Charles Dickens founded Household Words, a weekly miscellany intended to instruct and entertain an ever-widening middle-class readership. Published in the decade following the Great Exhibition of 1851, the journal appeared at a key moment in the emergence of commodity culture in Victorian England. Alongside the more well-known fiction that appeared in its pages, Dickens filled Household Words with articles about various commodities-articles that raise wider questions about how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services: in other words, how far the...

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works that includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious.