Explores the rise of the passenger transport network in the nineteenth century and the impact it made on Dickens's work.

The same week in February 1836 that Charles Dickens was hired to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, the first railway line in London opened. Charles Dickens's Networks explores the rise of the global, high-speed passenger transport network in the nineteenth century and the indelible impact it made on Dickens's work. The advent first of stage coaches, then of railways and transoceanic steam ships made unprecedented round-trip journeys across once seemingly far distances seem ordinary and systematic. Time itself was changed. The Victorians overran the separate, local times kept in each town, establishing instead the synchronized, 'standard' time, which now ticks on our clocks. Jonathan Grossman examines the history of public transport's systematic networking of people and how this revolutionized perceptions of time, space, and community, and how the art form of the novel played a special role in synthesizing and understanding it all. Focusing on a trio of road novels by Charles Dickens, he looks first at a key historical moment in the networked community's coming together, then at a subsequent recognition of its tragic limits, and, finally, at the construction of a revised view that expressed the precarious, limited omniscient perspective by which passengers came to imagine their journeying in the network.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It 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. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

Critical analysis of the magazines established and edited by Charles Dickens.

A glance over the back pages of mid-nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals published in London reveals that Wellington Street stands out among imprint addresses. Between 1843 and 1853, Household Words, Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, the Examiner, Punch, the Athenaeum, the Spectator, the Morning Post, and the serial edition of London Labour and the London Poor, to name a few, were all published from this short street off the Strand. Mary L. Shannon identifies, for the first time, the close proximity of the offices of Charles Dickens, G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew, examining the ramifications for the individual authors and for nineteenth-century publishing. What are the implications of Charles Dickens, his arch-competitor the radical publisher G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew being such close neighbours? Given that London was capital of more than Britain alone, what connections does Wellington Street reveal between London print networks and the print culture and networks of the wider empire? How might the editors’ experiences make us rethink the ways in which they and others addressed their anonymous readers as ’friends’, as if they were part of their immediate social network? As Shannon shows, readers in the London of the 1840s and '50s, despite advances in literacy, print technology, and communications, were not simply an ’imagined community’ of individuals who read in silent privacy, but active members of an imagined network that punctured the anonymity of the teeming city and even the empire.

As Lee shows in Overwhelmed, the rapid expansion of print created new relationships between literature and information. He presents a new argument: rather than being at odds, as generations of critics have viewed them, literature and information in the 19th century were entangled in surprisingly collaborative ways.

Written by leading scholars, this collection of essays offers the first comprehensive and accessible book on Dickens's style.

Published to mark the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, this book celebrates the greatest of English novelists by illustrating some of his abiding preoccupations. Prompted by quotations from the novels and other writings, each themed chapter explores contemporary images relating to salient topics of the Victorian age such as the public entertainments of London and the domestic pastimes of its inhabitants; the coming of the railways (which were to transform Victorian England in fiction and in fact); school life for children, and conditions in the workhouses and prisons which loom so large in many of the novels and which blighted Dickens's own childhood. Dickens was an incorrigible showman, and this book also explores his role as actor-manager of theatrical productions, as originator of the myriad stage adaptations of his books, and as supreme interpreter of them himself in the public readings which came to dominate his later years. Reproducing key extracts from the novels alongside a selection of the original covers as they appeared weekly and monthly in the bookshops, their crucial illustrations and all the paraphernalia of nineteenth-century advertising, is a unique approach which breathes life into the vibrant world of Dickens and his characters.

Charles Dickens is famous for his deathbed scenes, but these have rarely been examined within the context of his ambivalence towards the Victorian commodification of death. Dickens repeatedly criticised ostentatious funeral and mourning customs, and asserted the harmful consequences of treating the corpse as an object of speculation rather than sympathy. At the same time, he was fascinated by those who made a living from death and recognised that his authorial profits implicated him in the same trade. This book explores how Dickens turned mortality into the stuff of life and art as he navigated a thriving culture of death-based consumption. It surveys the diverse ways in which death became a business, from body-snatching, undertaking, and joint-stock cemetery companies, to the telling and selling of stories. This broad study offers fresh perspectives on death in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, and discusses lesser-known works and textual illustrations.

This volume shows how highly conscious Dickens was of words – of their meaning of course, and of the ideas they conjured up, but also of their very substance, texture, plasticity, visuality, and resonance, as well as their interactions with other words, and with their cultural environment. Each keyword is treated not as a semantic unit with a fixed meaning but rather as a flexible linguistic construct. Some keywords are just a word, a characteristic or even idiosyncratic lexical unit; some are treated as a load-bearing conceptual category or theme; some disintegrate into noise, complicating readers' assumptions about what a keyword must be. The focus shifts from "word" at micro- to macro-levels of signification, at times denoting wider cultural usage. Dynamic relations, oppositions, correlations and overlappings result from these individualized reading journeys, creating unforeseen and rich systems of meaning.