BY THE 1980S, WHAT HAD BEEN CALLED New Criticism in the 1920s and 1930s had become the conventional way of approaching literature, and ideologies of the aesthetic critics, the moderns, and their formalist disciples — once considered radical — had been superseded by new ways of examining works of fiction. Nevertheless, textual studies, biographies, and various forms of formal and aesthetic analysis continued to be published, and Dickensians of every critical persuasion kept up a lively dialogue that on occasion extended beyond the covers of books and journals.

In 1981, Murray Baumgarten, John Jordan, and Edwin Eigner established The Dickens Project at the University of California Santa Cruz. Their aim was to promote a different kind of study than that found in typical graduate schools. Funded by the University of California system and engaging scholars from many other campuses, the organizers set out not only to promote scholarship but also to provide opportunities for people to “experience” Dickens and his world. For more than twenty-five years the Project has supported the Dickens Universe, a week-long celebration during which scholarly work shares the limelight with recreations of Victorian England. What the Dickens Project has done quite well is to recreate the kind of community of Dickens lovers that existed in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the community that had created the Dickens Fellowship nearly a century earlier.