Reading Dickens Differently

A collection of original essays and innovative reading strategies?provides examples of reading Dickens in creative and challenging ways

Reading Dickens Differently features contributions from many of the field?s leading scholars, offering creative ways of reading Dickens and enriching understanding of the most celebrated author of his time. A diverse range of innovative reading strategies?archival, historical, textual, and digital?representing new and exciting approaches to contemporary literary and cultural studies. This groundbreaking volume brings together literature, history, politics, painting, illustration, social media, video games, and other topics to reveal new opportunities to engage with the author's life and work. 

This unique book includes a re-evaluation of Dickens? death and burial, new research data drawn from legal records and newspapers, assessments of well-known paintings and lesser-known illustrations, experimental readings of Dickens? texts in digital form, and more. Much of the evidence presented has never been seen before, such as Dickens' funeral fee account from Westminster Abbey, Dickens' death certificate, and a telegram from Dickens' son asking for urgent assistance for his dying father. Revising and refreshing the critical strategies of traditional Dickens studies, this important volume: 

• Features new research data on aspects of Dickens's life
• Discusses a range of innovative reading strategies (including physiological novel theory) for clarifying aspects of Dickens' work
• Examines the presence of Dickens in popular media and technology, such as Assassin?s Creed video game and A Christmas Carol iPad app
• Features rare illustrations, including documents and images relating to Dickens's death and funeral
• Edited by world authorities on Dickens and his manuscripts

Authoritative, yet accessible, Reading Dickens Differently is a must-have book for Dickens specialists, instructors and students in Victorian fiction and Dickens courses, as well as general readers lookingfor innovative reading strategies of the author's work.

List of Figures vii

Notes on Contributors ix

Acknowledgements xiii

Abbreviations xv

Introduction 1
Leon Litvack and Nathalie Vanfasse

Part I Reconfiguring Dickens 13

1 Dickens’s Burial in Westminster Abbey: The Untold Story 15
Leon Litvack

2 A Tale of Two Brothers: Reading Differently Dickens’s French Revolution 47
Lillian Nayder

3 Parallel Lives, Converging Destinies: Charles Dickens and Thomas Babington Macaulay 61
David Paroissien

4 Decent Restraint Spurned: Dickens, Penal Policy and Conflict at Cold Bath Fields Prison, 1846–1850 75
Neil Davie

Part II Reincorporating Dickens 93

5 A Somatic Experience of Dickens’s Fiction 95
Georges Letissier

6 Dickens and Lawrence: Mimicry, Totemism, Animism 113
Michael Hollington

7 Wreckage and Ruin: Turner, Dickens, Ruskin 125
Jeremy Tambling

8 Boz without Phiz: Reading Dickens with Different Illustrations 149
Chris Louttit

Part III Resetting Dickens 165

9 Speculation and Silence: Reading Dickens by Instalment in Time, at the Time and for Our Time 167
Pete Orford

10 Dickens Touches the Sky: Urban Exploration and London’s Greatest Author 185
Gillian Piggott

11 Dickens as Icon and Antonomasia in Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate 207
Francesca Orestano

12 From Movable Book to iPad App: Playing a Christmas Carol 223
Claire Wood

Index 243

LEON LITVACK is Professor of Victorian Studies at Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is Principal Editor of the Charles Dickens Letters Project and has authored numerous publications on the historical and visual approaches to Dickens.

NATHALIE VANFASSE is Professor of English at Aix-Marseille Université, France. Her monograph, La plume et la route:Charles Dickens, écrivain-voyageur was winner of the 2018 SELVA book prize.