The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

About the Author:
Robert L. Patten, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, John O. Jordan, Research Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz and Director, The Dickens Project, Catherine Waters, Professor of Victorian Literature and Print Culture, University of Kent

Robert L. Patten writes primarily about Victorian literature, graphic arts, and print culture. He has co-edited volumes of essays on Dickens with John O. Jordan (Literature in the Marketplace, Cambridge, 1995) and John Bowen (Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, Palgrave, 2006). His books on Dickens include Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978; 2nd edn. enlarged, 2017) and the Colby prize winning Charles Dickens and "Boz" The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author, Cambridge, 2012). His two-volume biography, George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art (Rutgers, 1992, 1996) was named the best biography of the 1990s by the Guardian. And for the Ashgate Library of Essays on Charles Dickens, a 6-volume series edited by Catherine Waters, he edited the volume on Dickens and Victorian Print Culture (2012).

John O. Jordan is Research Professor of Literature and Director of the Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Supposing Bleak House (U if Virginia Press, 2011). He edited The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens (2001) and has co-edited several essay collections on Victorian Literature and on Dickens, most recently Global Dickens (Ashgate 2012).

Catherine Waters is Professor of Victorian Literature and Print Culture at the University of Kent. She is the author of Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge UP 1997) and Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate 2008). She is series editor of the 6-volume collection, A Library of Essays on Charles Dickens (Ashgate 2012) and has co-edited several essay collections devoted to Dickens, the most recent being Dickens and the Imagined Child, co-edited with Peter Merchant (Ashgate 2015). She is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Dickens Journals Online project and a vice-president of the Canterbury branch of the Dickens Fellowship.