Abstract: Little Dorrit , among many other things, is an exposition of Dickens's ideas on how to present the supernatural in an appropriate language. The most immediately striking vehicle for this is its unusually large number of biblical quotations and pointed references to the Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. They provide a powerful rhetoric of ideas for the novel as a dramatic poem. Allusion to scriptural sources encompasses a great flexibility in tone: irony, contempt, horror, incredulity, amusement, approval. It sustains a sense of the supernatural dimension within the novel's naturalism. Dickens's presentation of different forms of evil in Little Dorrit has much in common with the presentation of the diabolic and the hellish in works he is known to have read in the 1840s: Shelley's "Peter Bell the Third," Swedenborg's treatise, Concerning Heaven and Hell , and Dante's Inferno , coupled with Paradise Lost .

Abstract: Most modern biographies of Dickens refer to his first major assignment for the Morning Chronicle : a trip to Edinburgh to report on a Festival in honor of Lord Grey. The visit has become celebrated by the inclusion, in the resulting newspaper copy, of a 238-word passage which, it has been remarked, "would not have been out of place in one of Boz's Monthly tales" (Slater 43). The present paper considers the fiercely bipartisan political atmosphere at the time, its expression in the contemporary press, and the impact on it of the famous passage. It is suggested that a jokey contemporary comment on the passage represents the earliest recovered quasi-personification of Dickens's authorial presence.

Abstract: Classic novels retold for children have received limited scholarly attention. Often cheaply printed, the interest they arouse is also transient: child readers become adults and either lose interest or move on to the unabridged text. Despite their transience and ephemerality, “classic” novels rewritten for children, especially retellings of Dickens, merit scholarly examination. These retellings appeal to child readers by centring the plots that revolve around child characters, shaping the popular imagination and reception history of these works. Since their initial publication, Dickens’s novels have been adapted, abridged, and anthologized for young readers by editors and publishers with various motives: to profit off Dickens’s fame, to promote literacy, and to support social change. Texts that rewrite “classic” authors like Dickens for young audiences reveal our cultural assumptions and anxieties about literacy.