Charles Dickens in Context

Dickens, a man so imbricated in his age as to be synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. As John Gardiner points out in The Victorians: Age in Retrospect (2002), Dickens ‘is crucial to our sense of the Victorians. Indeed it may even be felt that Dickens in some way is the key to the Victorian age; “Dickensian” often illuminates “Victorian”, rather than vice-versa’ (161).