DAVID PAROISSIEN (ed.), A Companion to Charles Dickens.

Abstract

DAVID PAROISSIEN’S handsomely produced Companion to Charles Dickens, published in the Blackwell series of Companions to Literature and Culture, competes with two other companions which have been in print for almost a decade now: John O’Jordan’s Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens (2001) and Paul Schlicke’s Oxford Reader’s Companion to Charles Dickens (1999; pbk 2000). This is a crowded market if one adds in the numerous companion essays on Dickens now available through more general student guides to Victorian literature and the Victorian novel. The Blackwell volume more than earns its keep. Where the (also excellent) Cambridge Companion grouped the novels into early, middle, and late fiction, in order to make space for new critical essays such as Adrian Poole’s ‘The Shadow of Lear’s Houseless in Dickens’, Paroissien’s volume, at more than twice the length, has room for individual treatment of each of the novels, as well as generous treatment of thematic and historical topics.