Volume I, “Sketches by Boz” and Other Early Papers, 1833–1839
Edited by Michael Slater
Out of print
Volume II, “The Amusements of the People” and Other Papers
Edited by Michael Slater
“If you want to know what it was like to walk the streets of London
in the early 1830s, nothing will tell you more vividly than Michael Slater’s
[book]. The journalistic pieces in it were written while Dickens
was still young and unknown. But they prefigure the obsessions of
his fiction—poverty, crime, physical deformity, the pitiless follies of
officialdom—and so illustrate the immense debt that 19th-century fiction
owed to journalism. . . . Slater’s is the first ever annotated edition
of Dickens’ Journalism, and his clarification of the slang and topical
references adds greatly to enlightenment and pleasures.” —The Sunday
Times
Volume III, “Gone Astray” and Other Papers from Household Words, 1851–59
Edited by Michael Slater
Dickens writes—sometimes scathingly, sometimes hilariously—about mid-Victorian
social concerns and social follies, several of which may seem familiar
to today’s readers: government incompetence and mismanagement, civil service
inefficiency, the glamorization of criminals, the excesses of puritanical
social reformers, the scandal of homelessness in London’s streets, the
deleterious English obsession with class, and the irresponsible or unethical
behavior of MPs.
Volume IV, “The Uncommercial Traveller” and Other Papers: 1859–70
Edited by Michael Slater and John M. L. Drew
“This convenient collection of Dickens’s early writing, some of it never before collected, lets the reader see the novelist developing themes that emerge later in the novels and helps students of literature, popular culture, and history understand important issues of the time.” —Choice
This volume presents over forty-five articles, essays, and recollections
published during the last decade of Dickens’s life. Both major and minor aspects
of the era of change and upheaval through which Dickens lived are captured here
with maturity, deceptive simplicity, and flashes of pure comedy.
Michael Slater is Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College in the University of London. He is the author of Dickens on America and the Americans, Dickens and Women, and The Intelligent Person's Guide to Dickens. He is also the series editor of the paperback Everyman Dickens. John M. L. Drew is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Buckingham.
