Dickens, a man so imbricated in his age as to be synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. As John Gardiner points out in The Victorians: Age in Retrospect (2002), Dickens ‘is crucial to our sense of the Victorians. Indeed it may even be felt that Dickens in some way is the key to the Victorian age; “Dickensian” often illuminates “Victorian”, rather than vice-versa’ (161). This book seeks to illuminate the contexts – social, political, economic and artistic – in which Dickens worked, as well as the ways he has been read and rewritten from the nineteenth century to the present. Described by James Eli Adams in A History of Victorian Literature (2009) as ‘the single most important literary career of the Victorian era’ (23), Dickens's professional life encompassed work as novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens's age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries.

Dickens felt himself to be incomplete without the context of his audience, what in a letter to F. M. Evans dated 16 March 1858 he famously called ‘the personal (I may almost say affectionate) relations which subsist between me and the public’ (Letters, viii, 533).