Dickens was the most successful and popular writer of his generation. The present paper will study a selection of his novels, as well as a range of his journalism and short fiction in its contemporary cultural, social and political contexts. Drawing on and extending older traditions, Dickens's writings played a central role in the development of the novel during the mid nineteenth century, often in controversial ways. His fiction actively intervened in a wide range of contemporary issues and debates between the 1830s and 1870. These include an investigation of modern urban society, particularly London; poverty, and state responses to it; the nature of capitalism and the relationship between social classes and between the underworld and the powerful. Dickens also explores the family as both a social unity and a shaper of the self; the nature and meaning of modern childhood and forms of femininity and masculinity; and the slippery relationship between the "normal" and the "abnormal". Dickens was familiar with many contemporary debates on the nature of the self, and his work explores a range of aspects of the nature of the conscious and unconscious mind: dreams, states of trance, double self and the working of memory, and these will be an important aspects of the module
Professor, P. G. Centre of English, Gaya College, Magadh University, Bodh Gaya
