John O. Jordan is Research Professor of Literature and Director of the Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Supposing Bleak House (University of Virginia Press, 2011). He edited The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens (2001) and has co-edited several essay collections on Victorian Literature and on Dickens, most recently Global Dickens (Ashgate 2012).

Robert L. Patten writes primarily about Victorian literature, graphic arts, and print culture. He has co-edited volumes of essays on Dickens with John O. Jordan (Literature in the Marketplace, Cambridge, 1995) and John Bowen (Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, Palgrave, 2006). His books on Dickens include Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978; 2nd edn. enlarged, 2017) and the Colby prize winning Charles Dickens and "Boz": The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author, Cambridge, 2012). His two-volume biography, George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art (Rutgers, 1992, 1996) was named the best biography of the 1990s by the Guardian. And for the Ashgate Library of Essays on Charles Dickens, a 6-volume series edited by Catherine Waters, he edited the volume on Dickens and Victorian Print Culture (2012).

Catherine Waters is Professor of Victorian Literature and Print Culture at the University of Kent. She is the author of Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate, 2008). She is series editor of the 6-volume collection, A Library of Essays on Charles Dickens (Ashgate, 2012) and has co-edited several essay collections devoted to Dickens, the most recent being Dickens and the Imagined Child, co-edited with Peter Merchant (Ashgate, 2015). She is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Dickens Journals Online project and a vice-president of the Canterbury branch of the Dickens Fellowship.

• Dickens Timeline


• Dickens Family Tree


• Introduction


• Part I: Personal and Professional Life


• 1: Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Biographical Dickens


• 2: Leon Litvack: Dickens's Lifetime Reading


• 3: John Bowen: Dickens as Professional Author


• 4: Tony Williams: Dickens as a Public Figure


• Part II. The Works


• 5: Paul Schlicke: Dickens's Early Sketches


• 6: Jeremy Tambling: Pickwick Papers: The Posthumous Life of Writing


• 7: Galia Benziman: Oliver Twist: Urban Aesthetics and the Homeless Child


• 8: Jon Varese: Nicholas Nickleby: Equity vs. Law


• 9: Sarah Winter: The Old Curiosity Shop and Master Humphrey's Clock


• 10: Mark Eslick: Barnaby Rudge and the Jesuit Menace


• 11: Logan Delano Browning: Martin Chuzzlewit


• 12: Michal P. Ginsburg: Dombey and Son and the Question of Reproduction


• 13: Ruth Glancy: Christmas Books and Stories


• 14: Philip Davis: David Copperfield


• 15: Kate Flint: Bleak House


• 16: Grahame Smith: Hard Times for Our Times


• 17: Francesca Orestano: Little Dorrit


• 18: Nathalie Vanfasse: A Tale of Two Cities


• 19: Mary Hammond: Great Expectations


• 20: Ian Duncan: Our Mutual Friend


• 21: Peter Orford: The Mystery of Edwin Drood


• 22: Michael Hollington: 'Milestones on the Dover Road': Dickens and Travel


• 23: Hazel Mackenzie: Journalism and Correspondence


• 24: Molly Clark Hillard: Charles Dickens and the 'Dark Corners' of Children's Literature


• Part III: The Socio-Historical Contexts


• 25: James Eli Adams: The Trouble with Angels: Dickens, Gender, and Sexuality


• 26: Holly Furneaux: Domesticity and Queer Theory


• 27: Tyson Stolte: Psychology, Psychiatry, Mesmerism, Dreams, Insanity, and Psychoanalytic Criticism


• 28: Jonathan Smith: Dickens and Astronomy, Biology, and Geology


• 29: David Vincent: Social Reform


• 30: Richard Menke: Dickens, Industry, and Technology


• 31: Claire Wood: Material Culture


• 32: Wendy Parkins: Dickens and Affect


• 33: David Paroissien: History and Change: Dickens and the Past


• 34: Chris Vanden Bossche: Class and its Distinctions


• 35: James Buzard: Race, Imperialism, Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, and Cosmopolitanism


• 36: Ayse Çelikkol: Dickens, Political Economy, and Money


• 37: Jennifer McDonell: Dickens and Animal Studies


• 38: Allen MacDuffie: Dickens and the Environment


• 39: Jennifer Gribble: Dickens and Religion


• 40: Helena Michie: Drinking in Dickens


• 41: Chip Badley and Kay Young: Cognitive Dickens


• Part IV: The Literary and Cultural Contexts


• 42: Daniel Tyler: Dickens's Language


• 43: Robert Tracy: Genres: Auctor Ludens, or Dickens at Play


• 44: John Glavin: Dickens and the Theatre


• 45: Helen Groth: Dickens's Visual Mediations


• Part V: Dickens Re-Visioned


• 46: Paul Young: Dickens's World System: Globalized Modernity as Combined and Uneven Development


• 47: Regenia Gagnier: Dickens's Global Circulation


• 48: Sharon Aronofsky Weltman: Adopting and Adapting Dickens Since 1870: Stage, Film, Radio, Television


• 49: Juliet John: Crowdsourced Dickens: Adopting and Adapting Dickens in the Internet Age


• Index