Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination

Sally Ledger is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Birkbeck, University of London.

• List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Note on editions and abbreviations used; Introduction: Dickens and the popular radical imagination; 1. Popular radical culture in Regency England: Peterloo and The Queen Caroline Affair; 2. Dickens and nineteenth-century show trials; 3. Dickens, popular culture and popular politics in the 1830s: Oliver Twist; 4. Christmas is cancelled: Dickens and Douglas Jerrold writing the 1840s; 5. Popular and political writing in the radical press: from Douglas Jerrold to Ernest Jones, Chartist; 6. Household Words, politics and the mass market in the 1850s; 7. Flunkeyism and toadyism in the age of machinery: from Bleak House to Little Dorrit; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Review of the hardback: 'Ledger offers fresh and convincing readings of well-known Dickens texts and of lesser known others. … her densely written and informed chapters give evidence both to the protean 'gestalt' of her topic and to the fascinating insights to be gained from informed readings of the texts in the ongoing critical debate. … The lavishly yet concisely annotated study is rounded off with a 'select bibliography' that exceeds many 'full' bibliographies of other studies. Ledger's admirable study is a major contribution to Dickens criticism and a welcome impulse towards the scholarly reconstruction of nineteenth-century radical discourse.' Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen