Introduction

Summary

THE LITERARY SENSIBILITY of Charles Dickens is possibly the most amply documented literary sensibility in history.” So writes Jane Smiley, herself a popular novelist, on the first page of her critical biography Charles Dickens (2002). A cursory glance at any research library's catalog would suggest Smiley is probably right. Books, articles, and reviews about Dickens and his work number in the thousands. For nearly two centuries he has been idolized and demonized. He has been cherished and dismissed. He has been taken to task for poor plotting and outrageous characterization, and held in awe for his ability to unite the disparate elements of the complex society about which he wrote. He has been celebrated as the upholder of Victorian values — and for being his age's most severe critic. He has been classified as an unexplainable genius, and intensely psychoanalyzed to discover the hidden sources of his creative powers. He has been deconstructed, reevaluated from the perspectives of gender studies and New Historicism, and adapted for the movies and television. What he hasn't been is ignored. No other English writer save Shakespeare has received so much attention. As a result, Lyn Pykett's pithy admonition in her 2002 critical survey of Dickens sums up the present state of Dickens criticism: “The twenty-first century critic writing about the nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens,” she says, “must inevitably engage with that complex historical phenomenon, the Dickens industry”