Despite the modern obsession with genetics and reproductive technology, very little has been written about Dickens's fascination with heredity, nor the impact that this fascination had on his novels . Dickens and Heredity is an attempt to rectify that omission by describing the hereditary theories that were current in Dickens's time and how these are reflected in his fiction. The book also argues that Dickens jettisoned his earlier belief in the prescriptive and deterministic potential of heredity after Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859.

This book takes a fresh look at childhood in Dickens' works and in Victorian science and culture more generally. It offers a new way of understanding Dickens' interest in childhood by showing how his fascination with new scientific ideas about childhood and practices of scientific inquiry shaped his narrative techniques and aesthetic imagination.

Undoubtedly the best-selling author of his day and well loved by readers in succeeding generations, Charles Dickens was not always a favorite among critics. Celebrated for his novels advocating social reform, for half a century after his death he was ridiculed by those academics who condescended to write about him. Only the faithful band of devotees who called themselves Dickensians kept alive an interest in his work. Then, during the Second World War, he was resurrected by critics, and was soon being hailed as the foremost writer of his age, a literary genius alongside Shakespeare and Milton. More recently, Dickens has again been taken to task by a new breed of literary theorists who fault his chauvinism and imperialist attitudes. Whether he has been adored or despised, however, one thing is certain: no other Victorian novelist has generated more critical commentary. This book traces Dickens's reputation from the earliest reviews through the work of early 21st-century commentators, showing how judgments of Dickens changed with new standards for evaluating fiction. Mazzeno balances attention to prominent critics from the late 19th century through the first three quarters of the 20th with an emphasis on the past three decades, during which literary theory has opened up new ways of reading Dickens. What becomes clear is that, in attempting to provide fresh insight into Dickens's writings, critics often reveal as much about the predilections of their own age as they do about the novelist. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania.

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.

A literary scholar who is an adult adoptee delves into one of the enduring themes of literature--the child raised by other parents

A study guide to Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," featuring a biographical sketch of the author, a list of characters, summary and analysis, and a selection of critical views.

Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dickens's novels. Here, Meckier argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. He periodically revised his competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairy tales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairy tale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from The Tales of the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's tragicomic view of the world.