This study argues that Dickens' villains embody the crucial fusion between the deviant and theatrical aspects of his writing.

We read the book, and the book is reading us. In his later novels, Charles Dickens uses the interaction between characters and their audiences within the fiction to dramatise his growing understanding of the pivotal role of spectatorship and choice in a more democratic society. Egotists of all stripes, intent on bending the world to their singular will, would appropriate the power of spectatorship by taking command of the detachment necessary for choice. Dickens’s pluralistic art of sameness and difference redefines that detachment, and liberates choice both inside and outside the novels, for the relationship between characters and their audiences within the narratives actually inscribes our own relationship with them in the performance of reading, a reflective doubling of the fiction upon the reader across time with moral consequences for our spectatorship of our own lives.

What did Dickens mean to Dostoevsky, and what did the Russian writer owe to England’s greatest entertainer? Many of Dickens’ readers, including George Gissing and Edmund Wilson, have recognized that his achievement needs to be compared with Dostoevsky’s, and they have suspected, or assumed an influence. N M Lary’s book shows what the literary influence really or probably was.

A Companion to Charles Dickens concentrates on the historical, ideological, and social forces that defined Dickens’s world. Puts Dickens’s work into its literary, historical, and social contexts Traces the development of Dickens’s career as a journalist and novelist Includes original essays by leading Dickensian scholars on each of Dickens’s fifteen novels Explores a broad range of topics, including criticisms of his novels, the use of history and law in his fiction, language, and the effect of political and social reform Examines Dickens's legacy and surveys the mass of secondary materials that has been generated in response and reverence to his writing

After Dickens is both a performative reading of Dickens the novelist and an exploration of the potential for adaptive performance of the novels themselves. John Glavin conducts a historical inquiry into Dickens's relationship to the theatre and theatricality of his own time, and uncovers a much more ambivalent, often hostile, relationship than has hitherto been noticed. In this context, Dickens's novels can be seen as a form of counter-performance, one which would allow the author to perform without being seen or scrutinized. But Glavin also identifies a rich performative potential in Dickens's fiction, and describes new ways to stage that fiction in emotionally powerful, critically acute adaptations. The book as a whole, therefore, offers a reading of Dickens through an unusual alliance between literary criticism and theatrical performance.

This volume of essays provides a selection of leading contemporary scholarship which situates Dickens in a global perspective. The articles address four main areas: Dickens's reception outside Britain and North America; his intertextual relations with and influence upon writers from different parts of the world; Dickens as traveller; and the presence throughout his fiction and journalism of subjects, such as race and empire, that extend beyond the national contexts in which his work is usually considered. Written by leading researchers from diverse countries and cultures, this is an indispensable reference work in the field of Dickens studies.