In the following essay, Sanders examines Charles Dickens ' portrayals of death and of deathbed scenes and asserts that they reflect both Victorian fascination with death and concern about the very high mortality rate of urban-dwellers in the nineteenth century.

Lodge is an English novelist and dramatist who is also highly regarded for his work as a literary critic and as the editor of several works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British authors. In the following essay, he evaluates Dickens's rhetorical strategies, which he believes form the polemical basis of Hard Times.

In the following essay, Cordery argues for the aptness of Harry Furniss as an illustrator for Dickens. The critic asserts that Furniss, who illustrated the Charles Dickens Library Edition after Dickens's death, was a corrective to the exaggerated, moralizing style of Cruikshank, and thus was better suited for rendering the complex vision of the author.

Wagenknecht is an American biographer and critic. His works include critical surveys of the English and American novel and studies of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Henry James, among many others. In the following excerpt, which was originally published in the 1931 edition of The Chimes, Wagenknecht asserts that this story is an important source for understanding Dickens's art and spirit.

In the following essay, Steig argues that Dickens's novels provide an overall model for observing the development of literary illustration, focusing his discussion on the novels illustrated by Hablôt Browne.

Stone is an American scholar and critic, whose works—many award-winning—include Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making (1979) and The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (1991), In the following excerpt, Stone examines the evolution of Dickens's writing style as evidenced by his skillful uniting of elements of fairy tale, allegory, autobiography, and psychology in The Haunted Man.

In the following essay, Long discusses Dickens's participation in the national debate on the common nineteenth-century practice of adulterating food and drink.

In the following essay, Allingham delineates the defining characteristics of Dickens's short fiction.

In the following essay, Baubles points out Dickens's concerns with the human cost of financial speculation by analyzing the effect of obsession with financial gain on the characters in Martin Chuzzlewit.

In the essay that follows, Eliot discusses melodramatic elements in the novels of Dickens and Collins.