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A Bibliography
Selected by Robert Newsom
for the 2001 Dickens Universe

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Note that some items listed here are themselves links. These appear in blue and are marked by underlining. Some links will take you to full-text versions of a work (though not all of these can be viewed from non-UC terminals), others will take you to sites where you may purchase the work and/or read more about it.

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 Links that appear as DJ take you to images of dust jackets. Disclaimer: Don't judge a book by its cover.

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For an image of the Bleak House wrapper design, click here or on the thumbnail: 
This a large file (266KB) that may take a  while to open.

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For a map of the Bleak House neighborhood, click here or on the thumbnail: 

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For the summer 2001 reading schedule and discussion and paper topics, click here or on the thumbnail: 
 This is an Adobe Acrobat ® file that requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader to be read. If you do not have the Reader, you may download it for free by clicking here.

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The MLA Database lists over 400 items on Bleak House written in the past twenty-five years or so, and about 200 of those have been published since the Universe last focused on Bleak House, in 1988. (Anyone interested may view the bibliography compiled in that year by Kelly Hager by clicking here.) Obviously the bibliography offered here is highly selective.

The Bleak House bibliography immediately below in general becomes more selective the more distant the date of publication. I am grateful to those faculty of the Dickens Project who have suggested titles. Items in this section that graduate-student and faculty participants in the 2001 Universe are asked to pay special attention to are marked with an asterisk (*); additional recommended items are marked with a §.

With the hope that it may be useful both to people just beginning their work in Dickens as well as those who like me are old enough to have forgotten many standard sources, I have appended with slight adaptation at the end of this bibliography  a more general Dickens bibliography from my Charles Dickens Revisited  DJ (New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000). I discuss Bleak House in that study briefly (pp. 113-30). For the text of that discussion, click here.

Of the editions in print, the best text is that of the Norton Critical Edition edited by George H. Ford and Sylvère Monod (New York: W. W.Norton & Co., 1977), which also contains lots of background information and excellent if somewhat dated criticism. The Penguin Classics edition (1997), which will be the edition used at the Dickens Universe in 2001, reprints all the original illustrations, but not, unfortunately, the introduction by J. Hillis Miller written for the 1971 Penguin edition. Copies of The New Oxford Illustrated Edition published in 1987 or after should be avoided as these are printed from very poor photocopies of earlier printings of this edition, which like the Penguin reproduces all the original illustrations. An e-text for Microsoft Reader is available for download from Amazon.com at a nominal cost, and free e-texts are available from Project Gutenberg. (An advantage of digital texts is that they can be opened in most word processing programs and then easily searched.)

Armstrong, Nancy.  "Fiction in the Age of Photography." Narrative 7 (1999): 37-55. Rpt. as "Foundational Photographs: The Importance of Being Esther,” in Fiction In The Age Of Photography : The Legacy Of British Realism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999.

Axton, William. "Esther's Nicknames: A Study in Relevance." Dickensian. 62 (1966): 158-63.

Bigelow, Gordon. "Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House."ELH 67 (2000): 589-615.

Blain, Virginia. "Double Vision and the Double Standard in Bleak House: A Feminist Perspective."  Literature and History 11 (1985): 31-46. Rpt. in Bloom and Tambling collections.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Charles Dickens's Bleak House. New York: Chelsea, 1987.

Budd, Dona.  "Language Couples in Bleak House."  Nineteenth-Century Literature  49 (1994): 196-220.

Butt, John and Kathleen Tillotson. "The Topicality of Bleak House." Dickens at Work. London: Methuen, 1957. 177-200.

Buzard, James. "'Anywhere's Nowhere': Bleak House as Autoethnography." Yale Journal of Criticism 12 (Spring1999): 7-39.

Buzard, James. "Home Ec. with Mrs. Beeton." Raritan 17 (Fall 1997): 121-35.

Chesterton, G. K. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens. London: J.M. Dent and Son, 1911. 148-59.

Collins, Philip. A Critical Commentary on Dickens's Bleak House. London, Macmillan, 1971.

Collins, Philip. Dickens and Crime. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968.

Connor, Steven. "Deconstructing Dickens: Bleak House." Charles Dickens. Longman Critical Readers Series. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985. 59-88.

§ Cummings, Katherine. "Bleak House: Remarks on a Daughter's Da." Style 21 (1987):  237-238. Rpt. in The Hysteric's Seduction in Fiction and Theory Stanford : Stanford UP, 1991) and in Tambling collection.

Daleski, H. M. Dickens and the Art of Analogy. New York: Schocken Books, 1970. His Bleak House ch. rpt. in Gilbert collection.

Daleski, H. M. "Dickens and the Proleptic Uncanny." Dickens Studies Annual 13 (1984): 193-206.

Danahay, Martin. "Housekeeping and Hegemony in Bleak House." Studies in the Novel 23 (Winter 1991): 416-31.

* Dever, Carolyn "Broken Mirror, Broken Words: Autobiography, Prosopopeia, and the Dead Mother in Bleak House." Studies in the Novel 27 (1995): 42-62. Rpt. in Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1998. DJ

Dyson, A. E., ed. Dickens's Bleak House: A Casebook. Nashville: Aurora Publishers, 1970.

Eigner, Edwin M. The Metaphysical Novel in England and America: Dickens, Bulwer, Melville, and Hawthorne. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Eigner, Edwin M. The Dickens Pantomime. Berkeley: U of California  P, 1989) . DJ

Ericksen, Donald H. "Bleak House and Victorian Art and Illustration: Charles Dickens's Visual Narrative Style." Journal of Narrative Technique 13, (1983): 31-46.

Fasick, Laura. "Dickens and the Diseased Body in Bleak House." Dickens Studies Annual 24 (1996): 135-51.

Frank, Lawrence. "'Through a Glass Darkly,' Esther Summerson and Bleak House." Dickens Studies Annual  4 (1975): 91-112. Rpt. in Gilbert Collection.

Gilbert, Elliot, ed. Critical essays on Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989.

Goodman, Marcia Renee. "'I'll Follow the Other': Tracing  the (M)Other in Bleak House." Dickens Studies Annual 19 (1990): 147-67.

Graver, Suzanne. "Writing in a 'Womanly' Way and the Double Vision of Bleak House." Dickens Quarterly 4 (1987): 3-15.

Hack, Daniel.  "'Sublimation Strange': Allegory and Authority in Bleak House."  ELH 66 (Spring 1999): 129-56.

Hall, Jasmine Yong. "What's Troubling about Esther? Narrating, Policing, and Resisting Arrest in Bleak House." Dickens Studies Annual 22 (1993): 171-94.

Herbert, Christopher. "The Occult in Bleak House." Novel 17 (1984): 101-15. Rpt. in Bloom collection.

Hochman, Baruch. "On the Bleakness of Bleak House." In Rereading Texts/Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H. M. Daleski. Ed. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, et al. Frankfurt and New York:  Peter Lang, 1997. Rpt. in  Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs, Dickens: The Orphan Condition. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.

§ Hutter, Albert D. "The High Tower of His Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Reader of Bleak House."  Criticism 19 (1977): 296-316. Rpt. in Gilbert collection

Korg, Jacob, ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Bleak House: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968.

Kran, Paul "Signification and Rhetoric in Bleak House." Dickens Studies Annual  26 (1998): 147-67.

Kucich John. "Action in the Dickens Ending: Bleak House and Great Expectations."Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33 (1978): 88-109. Rpt. in Bloom collection.

LaCapra, Dominick. "Ideology and Critique in Dickens's Bleak House." Representations 6 (Spring 1984): 116-23. Rpt. in Tambling collection.

* Michie, Helena. "'Who is this in pain?': Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend." Novel 22 (1989): 199-212.

* Miller, D.A. "Discipline in Different Voices: Bureaucracy, Police, Family, and Bleak House." Representations 1 (1983): 59-89. Rpt.in The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988 DJ  and in the Tambling collection.

* Miller, J. Hillis. "Introduction," Bleak House. Ed. Norman Page. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Rpt . as "Interpretation in Bleak House," in Victorian Subjects. Durham: Duke UP, 1991 and in Bloom and Tambling collections.

Miller, J. Hillis. "Moments of Decision in Bleak House." Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Ed. John O. Jordan Cambridge, UK.: Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2001. DJ

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

* Newsom, Robert. "The Uncanny." Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: Bleak House and the Novel Tradition. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Rpt. Santa Cruz: The Dickens Project, 1988. DJ Ch. 3 rpt. in Gilbert collection.

Newsom, Robert. "Villette and Bleak House: Authorizing Women."  Nineteenth-Century Literature 46 (June 1991): 54-81.

Ousby, Ian. "The Broken Glass: Vision and Comprehension in Bleak House." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29 (1975): 381-92.

Patten, Robert L. "Bleak House and the Literary Croesus." In Charles Dickens and His Publishers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978. Rpt. Santa Cruz: The Dickens Project, 1991. DJ

§ Peltason, Timothy. "Esther's Will." ELH 59 (1992): 671-91. Rpt. in Tambling collection.

Plotkin, David. "Home-Made Savages: Cultivating English Children in Bleak House." Pacific Coast Philology 32 (1997): 17-31.

Polloczek, Dieter Paul. "The Marginal, the Equitable, and the Unparalleled: Lady Dedlock's Case in Dickens's Bleak House." New Literary History 30 (1999): 453-78.

Pritchard, Allan. "The Urban Gothic of Bleak House." Nineteenth-Century Literature 45 (1991): 432-52.

§ Ragussis, Michael. "The Ghostly Signs of Bleak House." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34 (1979): 253-80. Rpt. in Gilbert collection.

§ Robbins, Bruce. "Telescopic Philanthropy: Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak House." Nation and Narration.  Ed. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. Rpt. in Tambling collection.

Rose, Jonathan. "How Historians Study Reader Response; or, What Did Jo Think of Bleak House?" Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices. Ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten. Cambridge, UK.: Cambridge UP, 1995. DJ

Sadrin, Anny. Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Samet, Elizabeth Dale. "'When Constabulary Duty's to Be Done': Dickens and the Metropolitan Police." Dickens Studies Annual  27 (1998): 131-43.

* Schor, Hilary. Dickens and the Daughter of the House. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1999. DJ

Shatto, Susan. The Companion to Bleak House. The Dickens Companions 3.  London and Boston: Unwin  Hyman, 1988.

Smith, Grahame. Charles Dickens: Bleak House. Studies in English Literature. London: Edward Arnold, 1974.

§ Stewart, Garrett. "The New Mortality of Bleak House." ELH 45 (1978), 443-87. Rpt. in Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984. Rpt. in Bloom collection.

Tambling, Jeremy, ed.  Bleak House. New Case Books. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.

Thomas, Ronald "Making Darkness Visible: Capturing the Criminal and Observing the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction." Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. Ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995). DJ

Thomas, Ronald. "Double Exposure: Arresting Images in Bleak House and The House of the Seven Gables." Novel 31 (Fall 1997): 87-113.

Toker, Leona. “Bleak House: ‘Not Quite So Straight, but Nearly.’” Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1993.

Van Boheemen Saaf, Christine. "'The Universe Makes an Indifferent Parent': Bleak House and the Victorian Family Romance." Interpreting Lacan. Ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983. Rpt. in Tambling collection.

Welsh, Alexander. Dickens Redressed: the Art of Bleak House and Hard Times. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. DJ

White, Allon. "Language and Location in Bleak House." Critical Quarterly 20, 1978:  73-89. Rpt. in Carnival, Hysteria and Writing: Collected Essays and Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993).

Wilkinson, Ann. "Bleak House: From Faraday to Judgment Day," ELH 34 (1967), 225-47.

§ Wilt, Judith. "Confusion and Consciousness in Dickens's Esther." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 32 (December 1977): 285-309. Rpt. in Bloom collection.

Zwerdling, Alex.  "Esther Summerson Rehabilitated." PMLA 88 (1978): 429-39. Rpt. in Bloom collection.

Dickens Studies Quarterly includes in every issue a "Checklist" that provides the most complete and prompt listing of new editions and scholarship. The annual MLA International Bibliography is available on CD-ROM and online at many university libraries, and in this form provides probably the most convenient access to almost everything published about Dickens since the early sixties. Philip Collins’s entry in The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, ed. George Watson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) is definitive for primary and secondary sources through 1967. Ada Nisbet’s chapter on Dickens in Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research, ed. Lionel Stevenson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966) and Collins’s chapter in Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research, ed. George H. Ford (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1978) provide excellent and highly detailed narrative accounts of sources of every kind. Dickens Studies Annual supplements these with yearly roundups by distinguished scholars. The Garland Dickens Bibliographies provide very full annotated bibliographies on each work; at this writing about a dozen have appeared. Greenwood Press is publishing a series of Dickens Companions that provide good bibliographic information as well as extensive explanatory notations on individual works. The Dickens Index, ed. Nicolas Bentley, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) is especially useful for information about individual characters and topographical references. The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke and Michael Slater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) DJ is the fullest encyclopedic reference and includes a select bibliography and a wealth of information on Dickens’s friends and the Victorian cultural context as well as individual works and characters.

Collins’s NCBEL entry is an invaluable source for information about the works, except individual contributions to Household Words and All the Year Round; The Dickens Index usefully lists all Dickens’s known journalism, and Harry Stone’s two-volume edition of Uncollected Writings from Household Words 1850-59 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968) reprints all the pieces from that journal in which Dickens is known to have had a major hand. Several facsimiles are important for an understanding of Dickens’s working methods. Harry Stone’s edition of Dickens’s Working Notes for His Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, Fred Kaplan’s Charles Dickens’s Book of Memoranda (New York: The New York Public Library, 1981), Philip Collins’s A Christmas Carol: The Public Reading Version (New York: New York Public Library, 1971), and A Christmas Carol: A Facsimile Edition Of The Autograph Manuscript In The Pierpont Morgan Library (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) are especially well done and informative. Bernard Darwin, The Dickens Advertiser (London: E. Mathews & Marrot, 1930) offers generous samplings of ads from the original issues in parts. Like Slater’s facsimile edition of NN in monthly parts (cited in chapter one), it helps recover the experiences of the first readers. Collections of letters worth mentioning in addition to those discussed in my note on references include R. C. Lehmann, ed. Charles Dickens As Editor, Being Letters Written By Him To William Henry Wills, His Sub-Editor (London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1912); Walter Dexter’s Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickens: His Letters To Her (London: Constable, 1935); and Edgar Johnson’s The Heart of Charles Dickens, as Revealed in His Letters to Angela Burdett-Coutts (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952). F. W. Dupee produced an intelligent and representative if abbreviated collection of Selected Letters (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1960), and David Paroissien has put together probably the best single volume—regrettably and unaccountably out of print—under the same title (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985). He arranges letters topically under the headings "Personal," "Social and Political," and "Professional" and provides excellent introductions and annotations.

Among journals, The Dickensian, which began in 1905, continues to produce the most rigorous and useful contributions to Dickens’s biography. As "A Note on References and Editions" implies, John Forster’s and Edgar Johnson’s biographies, both now out of print, are simply inescapable for serious students (and see also notes to chapters one through three for additional important biographical sources by Henry Dickens, Mamie Dickens, Aylmer, Kent, Nisbet, Rose, Slater, Storey, Tomalin, and Welsh, among others). Useful shorter biographies that were able to draw upon Walter Dexter’s three-volume collection of letters for the Nonesuch Edition are Una Pope-Hennessy, Charles Dickens: 1812-1870 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946) and Hesketh Pearson, Dickens: His Character, Comedy, and Career(London: Methuen, 1949). J. B. Priestley’s Charles Dickens: A Pictorial Biography (London; Thames and Hudson, 1961) has excellent illustrations, as do Angus Wilson’s The World of Charles Dickens(New York: The Viking Press, 1970), which is equally notable for its sound text, written by a major novelist who well understands that Dickens’s development did not end at Warren’s. Other centenary volumes notable for illustrative materials are Charles Dickens, 1812-1870: An Anthology Chosen and Annotated by Lola L. Szladits from Materials In The Berg Collection(New York: New York Public Library, 1970), Charles Dickens: An Exhibition to Commemorate the Centenary of His Death, June-September 1970(London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1970), and E. W. F. Tomlin, ed. Charles Dickens 1812-1870: A Centenary Volume (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969). More recent biographies of note include Fred Kaplan’s extremely professional Dickens: A Biography (New York: Morrow, 1988) and Peter Ackroyd’s immenseand highly idiosyncratic Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), which, like Wilson’s, gains insight from having been written by a practicing novelist.

Dickens’s childhood has naturally attracted specialized biographies. The first of these is Robert Langton’s The Childhood and Youth Of Charles Dickens (London: Hutchinson & Company, 1891), which adds a good deal to what Forster knew; the most recent and authoritative, if dry, is Michael Allen, Charles Dickens’ Childhood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), which corrects and adds to Johnson’s account; in between is the very readable and intelligent Christopher Hibbert, The Making of Charles Dickens (New York, Harper & Row, 1967). Albert D. Hutter, "Reconstructive Autobiography: the Experience at Warren’s Blacking," Dickens Studies Annual 6 (1977), 1-14 is an important psychoanalytic study that deserves to be read alongside Steven Marcus’s essay "Who is Fagin?" discussed in chapter two. Peter Rowland has compiled an interesting and entertaining autobiographical collage as My Early Times (London: Aurum Press, 1997). Although necessarily synthetic and in some degree fanciful, it is also scholarly, being scrupulous in identifying its components, which are drawn from all Dickens’s writing, including of course the autobiographical fragment.

Dickens’s celebrity in his lifetime insured that there would be a great many published recollections. Philip Collins has gathered the best of these in Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1981). For Dickens in his last years, George Dolby, Charles Dickens As I Knew Him (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), is worth reading in spite of its four-hundred-plus pages. (Dolby was Dickens’s manager for the reading tours after 1866.)

Excellent general background studies of the Victorians especially useful to students of Dickens are J. B. Schneewind, Backgrounds of English Victorian Literature (New York: Random House, 1970); Richard D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973); and Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830-1890, Longman Literature in English Series (London: Longman, 1993). Humphry House, The Dickens World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941) inaugurated modern historical scholarship on Dickens. House’s account of the political, religious, and more general intellectual ethos in which Dickens wrote becomes more valuable with every year that carries us further from the Victorians. John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson in Dickens at Work (London: Methuen, 1957) study topical influences and demonstrate how deeply involved Dickens was—his apparently universal appeal notwithstanding—in contemporary and local issues. (Tillotson’s "Introductory" chapter and her chapter on Dombey and Son in her Novels of the Eighteen-Forties[Oxford: Clarendon, 1954] show also how mutually influential were Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Thackeray, and Gaskell.) Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (London: St. Martin’s, 1962) and Dickens and Education (London: Macmillan, 1963) study subjects of great importance for Dickens and are worthy successors to House. So too is Norris Pope’s Dickens and Charity(New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), which provides along the way a better account of Dickens and religion than do many more precisely focused studies—as for that matter does Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), which is as much about the heavenly city as the secular. Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) discusses the roots especially of Dickens’s and Thackeray’s responses to sentimentality in eighteenth-century intellectual history. Robert L. Patten,Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) is the definitive study of a subject made especially interesting not only on account of Dickens’s enormous sales, but also his frequently contentious business dealings. Edwin Eigner’s The Dickens Pantomime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) demonstrates the influence throughout Dickens’s career of a peculiarly British tradition of children’s drama that draws in turn on fairy tales (a subject frequently treated by Harry Stone, e.g., in Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, Novel-Making [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979]).
 
 

The Dickensian, Dickens Studies Annual (formerly Dickens Studies), and Dickens Quarterly (formerly Dickens Studies Newsletter) are the specialized journals. Several others produce Dickens criticism of consistently high quality—among them, Nineteenth-Century Literature (formerly Nineteenth-Century Fiction), the interdisciplinary Victorian Studies, ELH, Novel, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.

Early Criticism

Criticism Since 1950

F. R. and Q. D. Leavis’s Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970) signaled a major shift in opinion by England’s most important and controversial critic of the mid-twentieth century, who, in his extremely influential The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948) had relegated Dickens to an appendix; here (as in his Clark lectures of 1967) Leavis put Dickens at the very center of his history not just of the novel, but of English literature more generally. Raymond Williams, writing out of a Marxist and Welsh working-class background, offered the other most intellectually challenging readings of Dickens in Great Britain at mid-century, especially in his Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958)—a vital book for all Victorianists—and more expansively in his chapter on Dickens in The English Novel: from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970) and in essays such as "Dickens and Social Ideas," Dickens, 1970, ed. Michael Slater (London: Chapman and Hall, 1970). D. A. Miller’s essays on Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and especially his Foulcauldian reading of Bleak House (reprinted in both Bloom and Connor) in The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) stand out among most recent influential work. Miller has a fine sense for the ways in which the novels collaborate in Victorian culture’s "carceral" tendencies while appearing to oppose them.

Important and representative criticism on somewhat more specialized special aspects includes James R. Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971) and Robert M. Polhemus’s chapter on Martin Chuzzlewit in Comic Faith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Ian Watt, "Oral Dickens," Dickens Studies Annual 3 (1974), 165-181 is a tour de force of thematic criticism that makes one regret Watt did not publish more about Dickens. John O. Jordan, "The Medium of Great Expectations," Dickens Studies Annual 11 (1983), 73-88 is very astute in understanding Pip as narrator—in seeing the adult Pip always mediating the experiences of the childish Pip. Peter Brooks’s likewise narratological essay on GE in Reading for the Plot (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984) is an established classic that shows (like the work of Welsh) how to be at once heavily indebted to Freud and original—as well as free of jargon. Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) contains an excellent chapter on the contradictions in domestic ideology apropos Hard Times and Gaskell’s North and South. John Kucich’s Repression In Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) has an important chapter on Our Mutual Friend informed by the unclassifiable French precursor of postmodernism, Georges Bataille, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s chapter on the same novel in Between Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) gives us the first major reading of "homosocial desire" in Dickens and is interesting as well about class. David E. Musselwhite, Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London: Methuen, 1987) has a long yet bracing chapter on Dickens in spite of being steeped in some fairly abstruse theory (most notably Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of desire). Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) discusses Dickens as Scott’s heir to the role of "national author." Richard Maxwell, The Mysteries of Paris and London (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) studies Dickens’s and Victor Hugo’s revival of allegory in their epistemologies of the city. Malcolm Andrews, Dickens and the Grown-Up Child (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994) is the best study of Dickens’s very complicated thinking about childhood and sets this off against an excellent account of nineteenth-century thought about childhood more generally. Joseph Litvack’s chapter on "Dickens and Sensationalism" in Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) addresses not only theatricality, but the genre of the "Sensation Novel"; he writes in a Foucauldian vein to show how the novel complicates distinctions between spectacle and surveillance. Jeremy Tambling, another heir to Foucault, is interested not just in the state, but class and colonization in Dickens, Violence, and the Modern State (London: St. Martin’s, 1995). Katherine Cummings in Telling Tales: The Hysteric’s Seduction in Fiction and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) offers a more flamboyantly deconstructionist reading of Bleak House than Hillis Miller’s and is also illuminating about gender.

Feminist criticism and its offspring gender studies have had a profound effect on literary criticism since about 1970, but Dickens before this (and after) has of course been written about with great intelligence by several women whose work is sensitive to issues of gender without necessarily bringing them to the fore—including for example Dorothy Van Ghent, Kathleen Tillotson, Barbara Hardy, and Janice Carlisle. Early classics of feminist criticism naturally tended to focus on writing by women and writers less apparently at ease with patriarchy than Dickens, but as early assumptions about the relationship of male and female writers to "dominant culture" have evolved, feminist and gender studies have produced a growing number of sympathetic (or at least pointedly ambivalent) readings that address Dickens directly. Thus, for example, Helene Moglen, whose 1976 book on Charlotte Brontë is a classic of American feminist criticism, eventually turned to Dickens in "Theorizing Fiction/Fictionalizing Theory: The Case of Dombey and Son," Victorian Studies 35 (1992), 159-84. An important and relatively early feminist work, heavily indebted to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, is Dianne F. Sadoff, Monsters Of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Brontë on Fatherhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Other noteworthy and relatively early studies are Ruth Bernard Yeazell, "Podsnappery, Sexuality, and the English Novel," Critical Inquiry 9 (1982), 339-350 and Laurie Langbauer, "Dickens’s Streetwalkers: Women and the Form of Romance," ELH 53, (1986), 411-431. Judith Newton, "Historicisms New and Old: ‘Charles Dickens’ Meets Marxism, Feminism, and West Coast Foucault," Feminist Studies 16 (1990), 449-470 articulates relations between feminism and New Historicism especially through a discussion of D. A. Miller’s reading of Bleak House. Her essay develops a line of thought begun in her "History as Usual? Feminism and the ‘New Historicism,’ " Cultural Critique 9 (1988), 87-122, which helpfully discusses the evolution of a wide range of feminist theory and criticism. Helena Michie, " ‘Who Is This in Pain?’: Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend," Novel 22 (1989), 199-212 and Mary Poovey, "Speculation and Virtue in Our Mutual Friend," Making a Social Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995) are especially insightful about bodies. Carolyn Dever has a very worthwhile chapter on Bleak House in Death and The Mother From Dickens To Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). I expect Hilary Schor’s Dickens and the Daughter of the House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) to prove itself the most influential and durable of book-length feminist studies, and the most likely too to establish itself in the mainstream of Dickens criticism.

Almost all the fiction was accompanied by numerous illustrations when it first appeared, and as these were executed under Dickens’s close supervision they are by most scholars considered integral to the works, even though except for George Cruikshank and John Leech the illustrators were not extraordinarily interesting in and of themselves.  Because most of the original illustrations were etchings, unfortunately they generally do not reproduce very well, even in better modern editions, and often they are so badly reproduced (as for example in the reissue of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens in 1987) as to be useless. Many libraries and used book stores make accessible editions with illustrations struck from the original plates, however, and to give the illustrations their due, it is important for serious students to make the effort to see them in the state in which they first appeared. Failing this, the first issue of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens, completed in 1958, has serviceable and complete reproductions; though reduced (but beware of more recent reprintings of this set, whose illustrations are very poorly reproduced). And the Clarendon editions have generally very good reproductions, including the wrapper designs and extra illustrations. Albert Johannsen in Phiz Illustrations from the Novels of Dickens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956) reproduced quite well most of Hablot Knight Browne’s plates in all their variants (for wear to the plates often required the etcher to produce two or even three plates); unfortunately it has itself become a rare book. The Dickensianhas from its inception included the illustrations among its interests and presents them well. Important secondary works are: F. G. Kitton, Dickens and His Illustrators (London: G. Redway, 1899); E. A. Browne, Phiz and Dickens (London: J. Nisbet and Company, 1913); Arthur Waugh’s essay "Dickens and His Illustrators" and Thomas Hatton’s "A Bibliographical List of the Original Illustrations to the Works of Dickens" in Retrospectus And Prospectus: The Nonesuch Dickens (Bloomsbury: The Nonesuch Press, 1937); J. R. Harvey, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970); John Buchanan-Brown, ed., Phiz!: The Book Illustrations of Hablot Knight Browne (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1978); Michael Steig, Dickens and Phiz(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); and Jane R. Cohen, Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980).

When consulting electronic sources one should be very cautious, for much material available online has been posted or published without the checks of peer review of any sort. The Internet is as much a highway of misinformation as of information.

Project Gutenberg, currently housed at http://promo.net/pg, is probably the best source for downloadable e-texts of the novels in the public domain—and much of the shorter fiction as well. Like the Dickens (Parsippany: Bureau of Electronic Publishing, 1994) is a CD-ROM containing most of the works (including several shorter items mistakenly attributed to Dickens), Forster’s Life and a miscellany of secondary sources, including Chesterton’s Appreciations and Criticisms. Allan Liu of the University of California, Santa Barbara maintains The Voice of the Shuttle, at this writing the most comprehensive collection of Internet links for literary studies; it can be found at  http://vos.ucsb.eduand is as good place as any to begin searching for electronic literary resources. Mitsuharu Matsuoka of Nagoya University (Japan) maintains a massive though not very conveniently organized Dickens page at http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Dickens.html. The University of California Dickens Project’s page is at http://humwww.ucsc.edu/dickens/index.html, and The Dickens House Museum’s site is at http://www.rmplc.co.uk/orgs/dickens/DHM/DHM2/index.html. Since film and video adaptations of the works themselves comprise an important subject, mention should be made here too of the Internet Movie Database, which can conveniently generate up-to-date and accurate lists of film and video adaptations of Dickens’s works. It currently resides at http://us.imdb.com.

Finally, there are two noteworthy electronic discussion lists. DICKNS-L is housed at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is devoted to Dickens. To subscribe, one should send the e-mail message "Subscribe dickns-l [one’s name]" to listserv@ucsbvm.ucsb.edu. VICTORIA is housed at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, is interdisciplinary and devoted more broadly to things Victorian. To subscribe, one should send the message "SUB VICTORIA [one’s name]" to listserv@listserv.indiana.edu.