The child who stops growing, infantile senility, the 'old-fashioned' child, child-wives and child-mothers, the rejuvenated adult - Dickens's writings parade before us a gallery of bizarre hybrids. Dickens and the Grown-up Child focuses on the complicated and unresolved relationship between childhood and adulthood in Dickens's fictional and non-fictional work. In challenging the familiar view that the source of such anomalies lies in Dickens's own childhood experiences, Malcolm Andrews explores the extent to which Dickens was heir to an older cultural debate about primitivism and progressivism, a debate which Dickens adapted to his own preoccupations with the tensions between childhood and maturity. In examining these issues, Malcolm Andrews concentrates on the fiction of Dickens's middle years, particularly David Copperfield, and on some of the journalistic essays.

Reproduction of the original: Holiday Romance In Four Parts by Charles Dickens

The figure of the child and the imaginative and emotional capacities associated with children have always been sites of lively contestation for readers and critics of Dickens. In Dickens and the Imagined Child, leading scholars explore the function of the child and childhood within Dickens’s imagination and reflect on the cultural resonance of his engagement with this topic. Part I of the collection examines the Dickensian child as both characteristic type and particular example, proposing a typology of the Dickensian child that is followed by discussions of specific children in Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House. Part II focuses on the relationship between childhood and memory, by examining the various ways in which the child’s-eye view was reabsorbed into Dickens’s mature sensibility. The essays in Part III focus upon reading and writing as particularly significant aspects of childhood experience; from Dickens’s childhood reading of tales of adventure, they move to discussion of the child readers in his novels and finally to a consideration of his own early writings alongside those that his children contributed to the Gad’s Hill Gazette. The collection therefore builds a picture of the remembered experiences of childhood being realised anew, both by Dickens and through his inspiring example, in the imaginative creations that they came to inform. While the protagonist of David Copperfield-that 'favourite child' among Dickens’s novels-comes to think of his childhood self as something which he 'left behind upon the road of life', for Dickens himself, leafing continually through his own back pages, there can be no putting away of childish things.

In Dickens and the Imagined Child, leading scholars explore the function of the child and childhood within Dickens’s imagination and reflect on the cultural resonance of his engagement with this topic. Part I begins by proposing a typology of the Dickensian child that is followed by discussions of specific child characters, while Part II focuses on the relationship between childhood and memory and Part III addresses childhood reading and writing.

Liminal Dickens is a collection of essays which cast new light on some surprisingly neglected areas of Dickens’s writings: the rites of passage represented by such transitional moments and ceremonies as birth/christenings, weddings/marriages, and death. Although a great deal of attention has been paid to the family in Dickens’s works, relatively little has been said about his representations of these moments and ceremonies. Similarly, although there have been discussions of Dickens’s religious beliefs, neither his views on death and dying nor his ideas about the afterlife have been analysed in any great detail. Moreover, this collection, arising from a conference on Dickens held in Thessaloniki in 2012, explores how Dickens’s preoccupation with these transitional phases reflects his own liminality and his varying positions regarding some main Victorian concerns, such as religion, social institutions, progress, and modes of writing. The book is composed of four parts: Part One concerns Dickens’s tendency to see birth and death as part of a continuum rather than as entirely separate states; Part Two looks at his unconventional responses to adolescence as a transitional period and to the marriage ceremony as an often unsuccessful rite de passage; Part Three analyses his partial divergence from certain widely held Victorian views about progress, evolution, sanitation, and the provisions made for the poor; and Part Four focuses on two of his novels which are seen as transgressing conventional genre boundaries.

This anniversary edition of the Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens celebrates 200 years since the birth of one of Britain's most popular authors. Covering his life, his works, his reputation, and his cultural context in over 500 A-Z articles, this is the most reliable and accessible reference work on Dickens available

This book explores the relationship between Dickens and canonical Romantic authors: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Keats. Addressing a significant gap in Dickens studies, four topics are identified: Childhood, Time, Progress, and Outsiders, which together constitute the main aspects of Dickens’s debt to the Romantics. Through close readings of key Romantic texts, and eight of Dickens’s novels, Peter Cook investigates how Dickens utilizes Romantic tropes to express his responses to the exponential growth of post-revolutionary industrial, technological culture and its effects on personal life and relationships. In this close study of Dickensian Romanticism, Cook demonstrates the enduring relevance of Dickens and the Romantics to contemporary culture.