The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection of essays on Dickens's life and works. It includes original articles on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. Contributors speak in new ways about his depictions of families, the environmental degradation and improvements of the industrial age, the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. And his understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.