Presents a collection of essays that traces the shifting importance given to childhood in Dickens' criticism. This title considers a range of subjects such as the Romantic child, the child and the family, and the child as a vehicle for social criticism, as well as current issues such as empire, race and difference, and death.

Contents: Introduction; Part I Biography: Early years: London,1822-27, Michael Slater. Part II The Romantic Child in Victorian Times: The 'cult of sensibility' and the 'romantic child', Peter Coveney; Introductory: Dickens, romantic psychology and 'the experience of modernity', Dirk den Hartog; Ambivalence and contradictions: the child in Victorian fiction, Jacqueline P. Banerjee; Dickens, David and Pip, Jerome Hamilton Buckley; The savage, the child and the caves of ignorance, Malcolm Andrews; 'Received, a blank child': John Brownlow, Charles Dickens and the London Foundling Hospital - archives and fictions, Jenny Bourne Taylor. Part III Childhood and the Family: The uncanny daughter: Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and the progress of Little Nell, Hilary M. Schor; Fractured families in the early novels: Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son, Catherine Waters; Reconfiguring the domestic: bachelor Dads, Holly Furneaux; Nation and generation in A Tale of Two Cities, Albert D. Hutter; From blood to law: the embarrassments of family in Dickens, Helena Michie. Part IV The Child, Empire and Difference: Suppressing narratives: childhood and empire in The Uncommercial Traveller and Great Expectations, Grahame Smith; Children of empire: Victorian imperialism and sexual politics in Dickens and Kipling, Deirdre David; Dickens and cannibalism: the unpardonable sin, Harry Stone; Heredity, class and race, Goldie Morgentaler; Girls underground, boys overseas: some graveyard vignettes, Catherine Robson; English cannibalism: Dickens after 1859, James E. Marlow; The Bluebeard barometer: Charles Dickens and Captain Murderer, Shuli Barzilai; Popular orphan adventure narratives, Laura Peters. Part V The Child as a Theoretical Vehicle: Dickensian deformed children and the Hegelian sublime, Jonathan Loesberg; Spirit and the allegorical child: Little Nell's mortal aesthetic, John Bowen; Name index.