Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer is the first modern book-length study of this important nineteenth-century educational reformer, author, and publisher. Though he made significant contributions during his lifetime to the cause of popular education, providing inexpensive but quality reading material for the newly literate working classes, Knight has been largely ignored by scholars. This neglect, the author suggests, may be related to Knight's association with the controversial Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and to the use scholars make of Knight's Penny Magazine and his two volumes on political economy to support their arguments on theories of social control and other issues. The author argues that Knight's reputation has suffered as a result. She reexamines the evidence to offer fresh assessments of Knight's life and work that illuminate his genuine achievements. She concludes with an evaluation of Knight's role as an innovative publisher who used the latest techniques to provide the emerging mass readership with unique combinations of text and image in his many 'pictorial' books and periodicals.

When Dickens was nineteen years old, he wrote a poem for Maria Beadnell, the young woman he wished to marry. The poem imagined Maria as a welcoming landlady offering lodgings to let. Almost forty years later, Dickens died, leaving his final novel unfinished - in its last scene, another landlady sets breakfast down for her enigmatic lodger. These kinds of characters are everywhere in Dickens's writing. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World explores the significance of tenancy in his fiction. In nineteenth century Britain the vast majority of people rented, rather than owned, their homes. Instead of keeping to themselves, they shared space - renting, lodging, taking lodgers in, or simply living side-by-side in a crowded modern city. Charles Dickens explored both the chaos and the unexpected harmony to be found in rented spaces, the loneliness and sociability, the interactions between cohabitants, the complex gender dynamics at play, and the relationship between space and money. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction demonstrates that a cosy, secluded home life was beyond the reach of most Victorian Londoners, and considers Dickens's nuanced conception of domesticity. Tenancy maintained an enduring hold upon his imagination, giving him new stories to tell and offering him a set of models to think about authorship. He celebrated the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, and detective plots take place behind their doors. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World wedges these doors open.