The child who stops growing, infantile senility, the 'old-fashioned' child, child-wives and child-mothers, the rejuvenated adult - Dickens's writings parade before us a gallery of bizarre hybrids. Dickens and the Grown-up Child focuses on the complicated and unresolved relationship between childhood and adulthood in Dickens's fictional and non-fictional work. In challenging the familiar view that the source of such anomalies lies in Dickens's own childhood experiences, Malcolm Andrews explores the extent to which Dickens was heir to an older cultural debate about primitivism and...

How does Dickens make his readers laugh? What is the distinctive character of Dickensian humor? These are the questions explored in this book on a topic that has been strangely neglected in critical studies over the last half century. Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster declared that " Dickens's] leading quality was Humor."' At the end of Dickens's career he was acclaimed as "the greatest English Humorist since Shakespeare's time." In 1971 the critic Philip Collins surveyed recent decades of Dickens criticism and asked "from how many discussions of Dickens in the learned journals...