Dickens is at his usual descriptive self, taking a long time to explain the difference between what most people think of as a waiter, and how the narrative character "Mr. Christopher" works as a waiter, which is a bit of a combination of a waiter, bellhop, porter, and other jobs around the hotel and restaurant world. In fact, the first eleven pages are exposition and scene-painting, and it's not until page twelve that we get to the focal point of the story: somebody's luggage.

The 55th report, submitted Sept. 27, 1886, includes a historical sketch of the institution from 1836-86.

Military Men of Feeling considers the popularity of the figure of the gentle soldier in the Victorian period, inviting us to think afresh about Victorian masculinity and Victorian militarism.

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.