The Chimes A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, a short novel by Charles Dickens, was written and published in 1844, one year after A Christmas Carol. It is the second in his series of Christmas books five short books with strong social and moral messages that he published during the 1840's.

This is the first collection to investigate Charles Dickens on his vast and various opinions about the uses and abuses of the tenets of Christian faith that imbue English Victorian culture. Although previous studies have looked at his well-known antipathies toward Dissenters, Evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews, they have also disagreed about Dickens’ thoughts on Unitarianism and speculated on doctrines of Protestantism that he endorsed or rejected. Besides addressing his depiction of these religious groups, the volume’s contributors locate gaps in scholarship and unresolved illations about poverty and charity, representations of children, graveyards, labor, scientific controversy, and other social issues through an investigation of Dickens’ theological concerns. In addition, given that Dickens’ texts continue to influence every generation around the globe, a timely inclusion in the collection is a consideration of the neo-Victorian multi-media representations of Dickens’ work and his ideas on theological questions pitched to a postmodern society.

Sally Ledger offers substantial readings of the influences of radical writers on works from Pickwick to Little Dorrit.

The Oxford Companion to Dickens (published in hardback as The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens) offers in one volume a lively and authoritative compendium of information about Dickens: his life, his works, his reputation and his cultural context. In addition to entries on his works, his characters, his friends and places mentioned in his works, it includes extensive information about the age in which he lived and worked: the people, events, and institutions which provided the contextfor his work; the houses he lived in, the countries he visited, the ideas he satirised, the circumstances he responded to, the culture he participated in. Compiled by a distinguished editorial team, The Oxford Companion to Dickens provides a synthesis of the state of the art of Dickens studies and contains a more authoritative, concise, extensive and accessible range of information than any other reference work on Dickens.

Barnaby Rudge, a novel by Charles Dickens, was initially published serially and later on, as a book in 1841. This was Dickens’s first attempt at a historical novel. Set in the late 18th century, it presents with great vigour and understanding the spectacle of large-scale mob violence. In what was a case of mistaken identity, Barnaby Rudge, the intellectually disabled son of a murderer, is arrested as a leader of a mob of anti-Catholic rioters. He is jailed and sentenced to death, but he is pardoned at the scaffold. Although it is one of his less popular novels, many called it "one of Dickens's most neglected, but most rewarding, novels.” Set in the year 1775, the plot of Barnaby Rudge revolves around John Willet, proprietor of the Maypole, and his three cronies. Solomon Daisy, one of the three, tells an ill-kempt stranger at the inn a well-known local tale of the murder of Reuben Haredale which had occurred 22 years earlier on that very day. After the murder, Reuben's gardener and steward went missing and were suspects in the crime.