Fascinated by them, unable to ignore them, and imaginatively stimulated by them, Charles Dickens was an acute and unsentimental reporter on the dogs he kept and encountered during a time when they were a burgeoning part of the nineteenth-century urban and domestic scene. As dogs inhabited Dickens’s city, so too did they populate his fiction, journalism, and letters. In the first book-length work of criticism on Dickens’s relationship to canines, Beryl Gray shows that dogs, real and invented, were intrinsic to Dickens’s vision and experience of London and to his representations of its life. Gray draws on an array of reminiscences by Dickens’s friends, family, and fellow writers, and also situates her book within the context of nineteenth-century attitudes towards dogs as revealed in the periodical press, newspapers, and institutional archives. Integral to her study is her analysis of Dickens’s texts in relationship to their illustrations by George Cruikshank and Hablot Knight Browne and to portraiture by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists like Thomas Gainsborough and Edwin Landseer. The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination will not only enlighten readers and critics of Dickens and those interested in his life but will serve as an important resource for scholars interested in the Victorian city, the treatment of animals in literature and art, and attitudes towards animals in nineteenth-century Britain.

Fascinated by them, unable to ignore them, and imaginatively stimulated by them, Charles Dickens was an acute and unsentimental reporter on the dogs he kept and encountered during a time when they were a burgeoning part of the nineteenth-century urban and domestic scene. As dogs inhabited Dickens’s city, so too did they populate his fiction, journalism, and letters. In the first book-length work of criticism on Dickens’s relationship to canines, Beryl Gray shows that dogs, real and invented, were intrinsic to Dickens’s vision and experience of London and to his representations of its life. Gray draws on an array of reminiscences by Dickens’s friends, family, and fellow writers, and also situates her book within the context of nineteenth-century attitudes towards dogs as revealed in the periodical press, newspapers, and institutional archives. Integral to her study is her analysis of Dickens’s texts in relationship to their illustrations by George Cruikshank and Hablot Knight Browne and to portraiture by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists like Thomas Gainsborough and Edwin Landseer. The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination will not only enlighten readers and critics of Dickens and those interested in his life but will serve as an important resource for scholars interested in the Victorian city, the treatment of animals in literature and art, and attitudes towards animals in nineteenth-century Britain.

The traditional view of parody as a low and parasitic form has been challenged by a number of critics. This text examines the exemplary use of parody in the novels of Charles Dickens, focusing on how he parodies the mode of melodrama while simultaneously employing melodramatic devices.

For years Dickens kept the story of his own childhood a secret. Yet it is a story worth telling. For it helps us remember how much we all might lose when a child's dreams don't come true . . . As a child, Dickens was forced to live on his own and work long hours in a rat-infested blacking factory. Readers will be drawn into the winding streets of London, where they will learn how Dickens got the inspiration for many of his characters. The 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth was February 7, 2012, and this tale of his little-known boyhood is the perfect way to introduce kids to the great author. This Booklist Best Children's Book of the Year is historical fiction at its ingenious best.

Stewart investigates the fanciful impulse among Dickens's characters, their exchange of semblance for reality, their use of the imagination as a means of retaliating against the fallen Dickensian world.