Dickens, Family, Authorship

This substantial study of the four novels published between 1843 and 1853 - Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield and Bleak House - discovers in the representation of family relationships a paradigm for Dickens's authorial development during this turbulent decade. Interweaving textual analysis with biography and a wide range of modern theorists, it provides a provocative account of the evolution of an author whose psychological insights anticipated Freudian and post-Freudian theory.