This volume places Dickens at the centre of a dynamic and expanding Victorian print world and tells the story of his career against a background of options available to him. The collection describes a world animated by outpourings of print materials: books, serials, newspapers, periodicals, libraries, paintings and prints, parodies and plagiarisms, censorship, advertising, as well as theatre and other entertainment, and celebrity. It also shows this period as driven by a growing and more literate population, and undergirded by a general conviction that writing was a crucial component of governance and civic culture. The extensive introduction and selected articles anchor Dickens's attempts to establish better conditions for writers regarding copyright protection, pay, status, recognition, and effectiveness in altering public policy. They speak about Dickens's life as playwright, journalist, novelist, editor, magazine publisher, theatrical producer, actor, lecturer, reader of his own works, supporter of charities for impoverished authors and fallen women, exponent of a morality of Christian compassion and domestic affections sometimes put into question by his own actions, proponent and critic of British nationalism, and champion of education for all. This selection of essays and articles from previously published accounts by internationally renowned scholars is of interest to all students and professionals who are fascinated by the composition, manufacture, finance, formats, pictorializations, sales, advertising and influence of Dickens's writing.

This volume places Dickens at the centre of a dynamic and expanding Victorian print world and tells the story of his career against a background of options available to him. The collection describes a world animated by outpourings of print materials: books, serials, newspapers, periodicals, libraries, paintings and prints, parodies and plagiarisms, censorship, advertising, as well as theatre and other entertainment, and celebrity. It also shows this period as driven by a growing and more literate population, and undergirded by a general conviction that writing was a crucial component of governance and civic culture. The extensive introduction and selected articles anchor Dickens's attempts to establish better conditions for writers regarding copyright protection, pay, status, recognition, and effectiveness in altering public policy. They speak about Dickens's life as playwright, journalist, novelist, editor, magazine publisher, theatrical producer, actor, lecturer, reader of his own works, supporter of charities for impoverished authors and fallen women, exponent of a morality of Christian compassion and domestic affections sometimes put into question by his own actions, proponent and critic of British nationalism, and champion of education for all. This selection of essays and articles from previously published accounts by internationally renowned scholars is of interest to all students and professionals who are fascinated by the composition, manufacture, finance, formats, pictorializations, sales, advertising and influence of Dickens's writing.

One of the most important British graphic artists of the nineteenth century, George Cruikshank (1792-1878) illustrated over 860 books, including several by Charles Dickens, and produced a vast number of etchings, paintings, and caricatures. The ten essays collected here first appeared in a special limited edition. In a new preface written for this paperback edition, Robert Patten shows how the insights of these seminal essays have been amplified by recent exhibitions and scholarship. The introduction by John Fowles has been retained and an index has been added. In addition to the many Cruikshank illustrations reproduced in the volume, there are original drawings by contemporary artists David Levine and Ronald Searle.

"Marley was dead, to begin with." Why does the most beloved of Christmas books open with a death? What has death to do with Christmas and New Years, and with Dickens's Christmas books and stories over his entire life? This book starts at the Paris Morgue and takes Dickens through his Christmas experiences from childhood and beyond, his celebrations of the season, and the sorrows that he often reviews in the New Year. Robert L. Patten weaves together Dickens's life, career, writings, journalism, travel, theatrical presentations, and religious convictions to offer a richly designed and entertaining narrative, fulsomely illustrated, of the manifold ways Dickens figures the spirit and traditions of the winter holidays in Victorian England. Both the gothic of ghosts and retribution and what he saw as the grotesque of lower-class enjoyment surface importantly in Dickens's fantasies. This volume discloses many hitherto overlooked connections between Dickens's writings and life and arrives at some surprising conclusions about Dickens's imagination, understanding of the conditions and meaning of Christian life, and the failures of British society to meet the pressing needs of its people. Not only does it address the public reception of these writings; it also tracks the responses and understandings of Dickens's illustrators, friends who found novel ways of telling, and mis-telling, the stories.

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.

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.

Winner of the 2012 Colby Prize Dickens' rise to fame and his world-wide popularity were by no means inevitable. He started out with no clear career in mind, drifting in and out of the theatre, journalism and editing before finding unexpected success as a creative writer. Taking account of everything known about Dickens's apprentice years, Robert L. Patten narrates the fierce struggle Dickens then had to create an alter ego, Boz, and later to contain and extinguish him. His revision of Dickens' biography in the context of early-Victorian social and political history and print culture opens up a more unstable, yet more fascinating, portrait of Dickens. The book tells the story of how Dickens created an authorial persona that highlighted certain attributes and concealed others about his life, talent and publications. This complicated narrative of struggle, determination, dead ends and new beginnings is as gripping as one of Dickens' own novels.

This innovative collection of essays addresses important issues in the history of the book. The multidisciplinary essays consider different aspects of the production, circulation, and consumption of printed texts, analyzing such topics as market trends, modes of publication, and the use of pseudonyms by women writers. Contributors draw on speech act, reader response and gender theory in addition to historical, narratological, materialist, and bibliographical perspectives to study authors such as Dickens, the Brontës and George Eliot.

This wide-ranging and innovative collection of essays addresses important issues in cultural studies and the history of the book. Multidisciplinary in approach, the essays consider different aspects of the production, circulation, and consumption of printed texts throughout the nineteenth century. Topics studied include market trends, modes of publication, the use of pseudonyms by women writers, readerships and reading ideologies, and copyright law; and the book examines a wide range of printed materials, from valentines, advertisements, illustrations, and fashionable annuals, to the more traditional literary genres of poetry, fiction and periodical essays. The authors under discussion include Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, Meredith, and Walter Pater. Contributors draw on speech-act, reader-response, and gender theory in addition to various historical, narratological, materialist, and bibliographical perspectives.