Dickens's multifacetedness as a writer and the wide range of his appeal to readers help to account for the extraordinarily large field of critical literature that has grown up in response to his work. Many anthologies of criticism devoted to particular works by Dickens have appeared, as have selections illustrating particular approaches to his writing or developments in criticism from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. However, the aim of this new series is to present a survey of the most important critical literature and key texts and thereby bring students and scholars up to date with...

The figure of the child and the imaginative and emotional capacities associated with children have always been sites of lively contestation for readers and critics of Dickens. In Dickens and the Imagined Child, leading scholars explore the function of the child and childhood within Dickens's imagination and reflect on the cultural resonance of his engagement with this topic. Part I of the collection examines the Dickensian child as both characteristic type and particular example, proposing a typology of the Dickensian child that is followed by discussions of specific children in Oliver Twist,...