This book examines Charles Dickens's fiction alongside publications emanating from Parliament. It argues that Dickens and Parliament were engaged in competitive efforts to represent the People at a crucial moment in the history of representative democracy--when the British government was under enormous political pressure to expand the franchise beyond a narrow band of male landowners. Contending that fiction and the literature of Parliament interacted at a host of levels--jostling one another in the same bookshops--it reads Dickens's novels in tandem with blue books, the practice texts of shorthand manuals, and Dickens's journalism. It shows how his fiction mocks parliamentary form (as in Pickwick Papers), canvasses the history of parliamentary representation (as in Bleak House), and depicts the relation of the People to the state as well as commerce (as in Little Dorrit). It thus rethinks the history of the Victorian novel by examining its rivalry with Parliament in the expanding world of print publication.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Miscellaneous Papers" by Charles Dickens. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

"The Paper Age" is the phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1837 to describe the monetary and literary inflation of the French Revolution—an age of mass-produced "Bank-paper" and "Book-paper." Carlyle's phrase is suggestive because it points to the particular substance—paper—that provides the basis for reflection on the mass media in much popular fiction appearing around the time of his historical essay. Rather than becoming a metaphor, however, paper in some of this fiction seems to display the more complex and elusive character of what Walter Benjamin evocatively calls "the decline of the aura." The critical perspective elaborated by Benjamin serves as the point of departure for the readings of paper proposed in Paperwork. Kevin McLaughlin argues for a literary-critical approach to the impact of the mass media on literature through a series of detailed interpretations of paper in fiction by Poe, Stevenson, Melville, Dickens, and Hardy. In this fiction, he argues, paper dramatizes the "withdrawal," as Benjamin puts it, of the "here and now" of the traditional work of art into the dispersing or distracting movement of the mass media. Paperwork seeks to challenge traditional concepts of medium and message that continue to inform studies of print culture and the mass media especially in the wake of industrialized production in the early nineteenth century. It breaks new ground in the exploration of the difference between mass culture and literature and will appeal to cultural historians and literary critics alike.

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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.