ABSTRACT Minor characters in Charles Dickens’s novels are often, in the words of Audrey Jaffe, “marked.” When this distinction of character is seen in a character with a disabled body, they are preternaturally able to create a group around them that Talia Schaffer has termed a “community of care.” This can be seen by focusing on the communities surrounding the Marchioness in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend (1865). The Marchioness attempts to find community through a marital dyad with Richard “Dick” Swiveller, while Jenny Wren finds a wider group of people with whom she can form mutually beneficial relationships. This article explores the impact these two forms of care communities have on marked, disabled female characters, and how Dickens realized the typical marriage plot might not be as effective in providing the care these characters required as he originally believed.

ABSTRACT This article argues that Søren Kierkegaard and Charles Dickens each identified and responded to the same social problem, called “leveling,” or the suppression of the individual in an inert post-revolutionary age. Kierkegaard analyzes the spiritual dangers of this abstracting force in Two Ages (1846), while Dickens in Bleak House (1852–1853) dramatizes a dialectic between mass society and the individual, which both exposes the empty reflections of a leveled society and, in Esther’s narration, intimates an escape route. In addition to glossing a conceptual history of “leveling,” this article advances a model for Victorian realism that disavows psychological interiority to guard instead the inmost self against reductive social abstraction.

ABSTRACT In Dickens Studies, the year 2024 is marked by interest in (1) Dickens’s lifelong appreciation for, contribution to, and utilization of the arts; (2) his traveling activities, whether undertaken within his native England, Great Britain, Europe, and North America or experienced in the imagination; (3) the identities and responses of his reading publics, those absorbing, engaging with, and even resisting his literary messages and persona during his active career, and ever since, a topic also provoking urgent considerations of how we do and can read Dickens’s dominant cultural works in thoughtful conversation with texts from other cultures; (4) calls in this digital era to fulfill the twentieth-century dream of globalizing Dickens studies, transcending linguistic barriers and traditional centering of scholarship from the Northern Hemisphere; and (5) exploration of Dickens’s evocative powers over Victorian infrastructures and atmospheres, altering the properties of matter, rendering elements symbolic, and exploiting tragedy and comedy in their many cultural aspects to create an unforgettable Dickensian affect, resurrected in Neo-Victorian homages, that can illustrate stark social truths.

ABSTRACT In the 1940s and early 1950s, three establishment critics, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and George Orwell, each independently wrote essays championing the relevance of Dickens for their own time, an age of intense political conflict. Why? What seems most likely is that they were drawn to Dickens out of a feeling of political partisanship, of kindred-spiritedness. As much as some may strive for objective standards by which to judge literature, artistic tastes and inclinations are shaped, bent, and sometimes broken by current affairs and the times people live in. This article is a personal meditation on the value of reading a classic writer such as Dickens during times of social and political instability.

ABSTRACT This article gives renewed attention to Dickens’s final “ghost story,” “No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman.” It first historicizes the story in terms of Victorian fears about an expanding and poorly regulated rail network and how that might affect the lives of passengers and rail workers. It then examines Dickens’s interests in mesmerism and integrating science and humanism as a possible response to industrial trauma. Next, it turns to more contemporary critical approaches that address the signalman’s malady in terms of trauma studies, Marx’s theory of alienation, and psychoanalysis. Finally, it postulates that the story prefigures what Rosi Braidotti has characterized as the “posthuman predicament,” in which the assimilation of individuals into technological systems produces hybrid, cybernetic entities. The article concludes that Dickens not only incorporated Victorian science and medicine into the story but also anticipated the possibility that increasingly elaborate systems technologies, such as the railway system, could produce a posthuman subject, or “cyborg,” a human-machine hybrid that shares consciousness itself.

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the pros and cons of Personal Voice criticism, the author’s professional and personal identifications with The Pickwick Papers, and how these identifications most specifically recur in Pickwick’s storied inns.

ABSTRACT Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy came from different backgrounds and lived in different parts of the world, yet Dickens’s literary influence on Russian novelists is immense and Leo Tolstoy’s love of Dickens is undeniable in his letters, memoirs, and diaries. Tolstoy viewed Dickens as a harsh social critic and a champion for the poor, the underprivileged and the oppressed. Both writers are not only known as social commentators but the recorders of many problems of their time: they both strived to attain the ideal of goodness in life and society. The novels of Dickens and Tolstoy differ in style, narratology, purpose, thematical unity, and motifs, yet these writers’ dedication to democracy and humanism is evident in their works. The goal of this article is to trace the influence Charles Dickens had on Leo Tolstoy and identify key references to Dickens in Tolstoy’s own writings that would enhance modern-day scholars’ and readers’ understanding and appreciation of these two timeless novelists.

ABSTRACT An annotated checklist presented by decades of all the performances of stage adaptations of the works of Charles Dickens on New York City’s Broadway stages from 1836 through 2024.

ABSTRACT Building upon recent reevaluations of mid-nineteenth century melodrama by Elaine Hadley and Jonathan M. Hess, this essay presents a reading of David Copperfield (1850) focused on the story of Rosa Dartle, whose ill-fated romance and subsequent entrapment buttress the successful marriage plot between David and Agnes. By evaluating this seemingly minor character in terms derived from Alex Woloch’s The One vs. The Many, a clearer picture of Rosa’s importance within the novel’s sprawling character-system emerges. To this end, this article presents an overview of previous work concerning Rosa Dartle and demonstrate some details of her characterization that scholars have ignored or dismissed. The article’s focus, however, drifts from character to plot, revealing how Rosa Dartle’s “cursed” history underlies the marriage plot as a critique of a stratified, hierarchical, masculinist society. The explosive “curse scene” excising Rosa from the novel’s plot reveals how Dickens’s novel conceives of the perseverance of these hierarchical mores in terms of anachronism and malediction.

ABSTRACT This article focuses on developments in the study of nineteenth-century crime fiction since 2015. The volume of scholarship in that area means that this review is not comprehensive, and it restricts its scope solely to crime fiction scholarship with direct connections to Victorian or other nineteenth-century anglophone texts. This review breaks the last decade in this field down into five branches or efforts: Historical Recovery, where scholars seek to dismantle and correct past simplistic histories of the genre; Cultural and Colonial Forces, which seek to map the material, sociological, and imperial processes that affected the development of the genre; Crime Fiction and the State, where scholars investigate the complex mutually influential relationship between the law, true crime discourse, and crime fiction; Adaptation and Readership, which charts the long afterlives and persisting popularity of crime fiction texts; and Worlding Crime Fiction, which seeks to break down the period, regional, and linguistic barriers to understanding crime fiction’s global reach. The review ends with a call for both more interdisciplinary work and communication and identifies a driving question for each of these five discourses within the study of Victorian detective fictions.