Dickens's career as a journalist spanned four decades, during which he wrote over 350 articles: reports, sketches, reviews, leaders, exposés, satires and reminiscences. This project offers the first critical guide to over a million words of vintage Dickens, which have been much overlooked in continuous assessments and re-assessments of his novels. It provides both a biographical and socio-historical account of the main phases of Dickens's career as a journalist, and a critical assessment of the thematic and stylistic development of his work.

Of the nearly 3000 articles published in Household Words, some 100 related to Australia and have been collected in this anthology. Dickens saw Australia offering opportunities for England's poor and downtrodden to make a new start and a brighter future for themselves; optimism reflected in many of the articles.

This book produces an original argument about the emergence of ‘trauma’ in the nineteenth-century through new readings of Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Collins, Gaskell and Elliot. Madeleine Wood argues that the mid-Victorian novels present their protagonists in a state of damage, provoked and defined by the conditions of the mid-century family: the cross-generational relationship is presented as formative and traumatising. By presenting family relationships as decisive for our psychological state as well as our social identity, the Victorian authors pushed beyond the contemporary scientific models available to them. Madeleine Wood analyses the literary and historical conditions of the mid-century period that led to this new literary emphasis, and which paved the way for the emergence of psychoanalysis in Vienna at the fin de siècle. Analysing a series of theoretical texts, Madeleine Wood shows that psychoanalysis shares the mid-Victorian concern with the unequal relationship between adult and child, focusing her reading through Freud’s early writings and Jean Laplanche’s ‘general theory of seduction’.