The Scriptures of Charles Dickens

This book is a study of Dickens's treatment of the relations between self and society principally in Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, with particular reference to processes of culture formation and the ways in which Dickens's writings both serve and transcend them. Liberal humanism and middle-class hegemony feature centrally in the developing system of values and regulation, where Dickens played a crucial role in formulating and promulgating such salient guiding principles as those of sympathy, marriage and the family, economic responsibility, and hierarchy within and between groups. The novels are consistently confirmed as great creative achievements but also as primary sites of the evolving Victorian dispensation and revolution of ideas, as well as being illuminators of our own complex modernity. Reference is made throughout to other contemporary writers, including sociological, philosophic, and medical discourse, to relevant recent theory, and to traditions, like that of Puritan spiritual autobiography, which Dickens adapted to new ends.