...Kathleen Frederickson Kathleen Frederickson “Getting the Goods in Little Dorrit : Quarantine’s Queer Logistics” (pp. 159–183) Most queer readings of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) have focused on Miss Wade as a figure of proto-sexological pathology. Flipping critical attention to Tattycoram...

...Sukanya Banerjee Sukanya Banerjee, “Writing Bureaucracy, Bureaucratic Writing: Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit , and Mid-Victorian Liberalism” (pp. 133–158) In its famed representation of the Circumlocution Office, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) is widely recognized as satirizing bureaucracy...

...Daniel M. Stout Daniel M. Stout, “ Little , Maybe Less: Little Dorrit ’s Minimal Moralia” (pp. 207–238) Against our ordinary ways of reading the novel, this essay argues that Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) represents a stark refusal of the logics of accountability that necessarily...

...Jason R. Rudy Jason R. Rudy, “Settled: Dorrit Down Under” (pp. 184–206) Although the conclusion to Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57) finds the protagonists Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit comfortably situated in London, the novel’s long and meandering narrative entertains alternate...

...Brianna Beehler Brianna Beehler, “The Doll’s Gift: Ventriloquizing Bleak House ” (pp. 24–49) This essay offers a new reading of the split narrative in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). Previous critics of the novel’s split narrative have primarily focused on the unequal knowledge...

...Victoria Wiet Victoria Wiet, “Dickens’s Tableaux: Melodrama and Sexual Opacity in David Copperfield and Bleak House ” (pp. 167–198) This essay examines the features and function of tableaux in two novels by Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850) and Bleak House (1853), in order to rethink...

...Herbert F. Tucker Herbert F. Tucker, “Verse Visa: Dickens Adapts Poetry in The Old Curiosity Shop ” (pp. 433–451) In Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Dick Swiveller’s hilariously eclectic misquotation of popular verse coexists with Dickens’s own grave proclivity to fall...

...Andrew Willson Andrew Willson, “Vagrancy and the Fantasy of Unproductive Writing in David Copperfield ” (pp. 192–217) Recent criticism of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50) has often drawn attention to the eponymous character’s rise to respectable and productive professional authorship...

...Supritha Rajan Supritha Rajan, “The Epistemology of Trust and Realist Effect in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House ” (pp. 64–106) This essay argues that the narrative structure of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–1853), which repeatedly shifts from the omniscient narrator’s skeptical stance...

...Iain Crawford This essay revisits a public dispute between Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens during the winter of 1855–56. It argues both that the nature of their quarrel has been largely misunderstood and also that its wider implications for understanding nineteenth-century intellectual...

...Elaine Auyoung This essay argues that Charles Dickens’s imaginative interest in barriers to knowledge and perception throughout Bleak House (1852–53) amplifies and attunes us to the reader’s position of exteriority with respect to the implied fictional world. Whereas novel readers readily describe...

...Alex Tickell This essay considers the theme of the contract as a metonym for failed government in Charles Dickens’s and Wilkie Collins’s collaborative Christmas story The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857), written to commemorate the Indian “Mutiny.” Building on critical studies by Myron...

...George Yeats This essay argues that the literary atmosphere of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57) reciprocates the condition of the mid-century London air, as Dickens understood it. Through exploring the novel’s connections with contemporary medical-political debates about air purity, I hope...

...Andrew McCann This essay revisits Theodor Adorno's discussion of allegory in Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) in order to retrieve a sense of the radicality of a form that is usually dismissed by contemporary critics as anachronistic and somehow inadequate to the modernity...

...Larisa T. Castillo This essay argues that Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1843) challenges the legal justifications underpinning Sergeant Talfourd's 1842 Copyright Extension Act. The novel does so by problematizing the logic of natural right, a logic adopted by proponents of copyright...

...Holly Furneaux Holly Furneaux, “Charles Dickens's Families of Choice: Elective Affinities, Sibling Substitution, and Homoerotic Desire” (pp. 153–192) This essay focuses upon one particularly rich strategy through which Charles Dickens and his contemporaries articulated the queer possibilities...

...PRITI JOSHI This essay asks what, if any, import the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 had on A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens�s fictionalized account of the French Revolution. Begun shortly after the Indian uprising started, Dickens�s historical novel appears studiously to avoid any mention...