Essays exploring the ways in which Dickens' vision is both so much of its time, and yet has so much resonance for today. The scale of the 2012 bicentenary celebrations of Dickens's birth is testimony to his status as one of the most globally popular literary authors the world has ever seen. Yet Dickens has also become associated in the public imagination with a particular version of the Victorian past and with respectability. His continued cultural prominence and the "brand recognition" achieved by his image and images suggest that his vision reaches out beyond the Victorianperiod. Yet what is the relationship between Dickens and the modern world? Do his works offer a consoling version of the past or are they attuned to that state of uncertainty and instability we associate with the nebulous but resonant concept of modernity? This volume positions Dickens as both a literary and a cultural icon with a complex relationship to the cultural landscape in his own period and since. It seeks to demonstrate that oppositions which have pervaded approaches to Dickens - Victorian vs modern, artist vs entertainer, culture vs commerce - are false, by exploring the diversity and multiplicity of Dickens's textual and extra-textual lives. A specially commissioned Afterword by Florian Schweizer, Director of the Dickens 2012 celebrations, offers a fascinating insight into the shaping of this year-long public programme of commemoration of Dickens. Like the volume as a whole, it asks us toconsider the nature of our connection with "this quintessentially Victorian writer" and what it is about Dickens that still appeals to people around the world. Professor Juliet John holds the Hildred Carlile Chair of English Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributors: Jay Clayton, Holly Furneaux, John Drew, Michaela Mahlberg, Juliet John, Michael Hollington, Joss Marsh, Carrie Sickmann, Kim Edwardes Keates, DominicRainsford, Florian Schweizer

Military Men of Feeling considers the popularity of the figure of the gentle soldier in the Victorian period. It traces a persistent narrative swerve from tales of war violence to reparative accounts of soldiers as moral exemplars, homemakers, adopters of children on the battlefield, and nurses. This material invites us to think afresh about Victorian masculinity and Victorian militarism. It challenges ideas about the separation of military and domestic life, and about the incommunicability of war experience. Focusing on representations of soldiers' experiences of touch and emotion, the book combines the work of well known writers - including Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Yonge - with previously unstudied writing and craft produced by British soldiers in the Crimean War, 1854-56. The Crimean War was pivotal in shaping British attitudes to military masculinity. A range of media enabled unprecedented public engagement with the progress and infamous 'blunders' of the conflict. Soldiers and civilians reflected on appropriate behaviour across ranks, forms of heroism, the physical suffering of the troops, administrative management and the need for army reform. The book considers how the military man of feeling contributes to the rethinking of gender roles, class and military hierarchy in the mid-nineteenth century, and how this figure was used in campaigns for reform. The gentle soldier could also do more bellicose social and political work, disarming anti-war critiques and helping people to feel better about war. This book looks at the difficult mixed politics of this figure. It considers questions, debated in the nineteenth century and which remain urgent today, about the relationship between feeling and action, and the ethics of an emotional response to war. It makes a case for the importance of emotional and tactile military history, bringing the Victorian military man of feeling into contemporary debates about liberal warriors and soldiers as social workers.

Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. This book illuminates the worlds - social, political, economic and artistic - in which Dickens worked. Dickens's professional life encompassed work as a novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens's age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries. Through 45 digestible short chapters written by a leading expert on each topic, a rounded picture emerges of Dickens's engagement with his time, the influence of his works and the ways he has been read, adapted and re-imagined from the nineteenth century to the present.

This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, martially resistant men, and male nurses. It explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his articulation, over the course of his career, of homoerotic desire.
Holly Furneaux places Dickens's writing in a broad literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life-writing, journalism, and legal and political debates, Queer Dickens argues that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it contends that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness.
Queer Dickens intervenes in current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of the histories of the family and of sexuality. It makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life-affirming trajectory in queer theory.

Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. This book illuminates the worlds - social, political, economic and artistic - in which Dickens worked. Dickens's professional life encompassed work as a novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens's age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries. Through 45 digestible short chapters written by a leading expert on each topic, a rounded picture emerges of Dickens's engagement with his time, the influence of his works and the ways he has been read, adapted and re-imagined from the nineteenth century to the present.