This study of Dickens touches on all the major fiction. It is organized thematically, but the order in which the several themes are examined reflects the progress of Dickens's career. For those readers who prefer to be given a sense of the writer's development, there is this rough chronological sequence; otherwise, the various chapters could be regarded as preliminary discussions of concerns and compulsions that recur at every stage, and in every aspect, of Dickens's work.

It is of course impossible in this very short book to do justice to so many crowded and lengthy novels. Rather than write briefly about each one, I have chosen to give relatively comprehensive readings of a few, in order to demonstrate in some detail the systematic complexity of Dickens's writing. Those texts that have received the more thoroughgoing treatment fall, either wholly or in part, into the category of first-person narratives.

It is through the use of the first person in novels, letters, and travel writings that Dickens reveals a good deal not only about his own identity, but also about the construction of Victorian subjectivity in general. The overriding focus of the analyses in this book is a literary one, although it also includes a series of reflections on aspects of Victorian society and culture: prisons, schools, money, poverty, fallen women, orphans, detectives, crowds, the Great Exhibition; Dickens is forever tracing the connections between these different facets of life in Victorian Britain. The manner in which he makes these connections is both unique and symptomatic – the product of an individual psychology and the basis of a cultural poetics.