Introduction

On November 6, 2020, late in the sesquicentennial year of Dickens’s death, two photographs of Dickens appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Arresting and similar images of the inimitable one sitting in a chair and revealed in half profile as taken by the Watkins Brothers circa 1860. Beneath them on the top of the Book Review section is the large-type title, “Dickensworld.” Indeed.

The long essay that followed is ostensibly a review of a new biography of Dickens, but that is summarily dismissed, and what in fact is presented is a valuable musing on Dickens the man, his works, his afterlife, and especially his reputation, that begins with the following:

This year is the 150th anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens —Dickens, who as time goes by emerges ever more conclusively as England’s greatest novelist and the literary figure who has come to govern our sense of the Victorian era; to embody it, really. And who also happens, in all likelihood, to be the most popular novelist who ever lived.

Readers of this journal will appreciate that ringing endorsement of the writer who we think, read, and write about. The author of that review essay is the venerable Robert Gottlieb, former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf book publishers and The New Yorker magazine. He is surely as informed on literary matters of the present and past century as anyone who has graced the pages of the New York Times, so his views command respect. As editors we welcome his affirmations, including on the value of aesthetic judgment and, implicitly, the value of what we do as literary scholars.

As editors today we often are presented with essays and perspectives that grind critical paths and take hard work before they emerge in print. We regularly cry out for help to identify the new ideas so as to help the author express them to us uninformed though learned readers and editors. We thank all of our outside readers for their continued help and support in bringing new understandings and appreciations to the world of Victorian fiction, even while currently struggling with the many obstacles brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. And we appreciate Robert Gottlieb for bringing us back to the big picture, “Dickensworld,” and reminding a wide audience that Dickens matters a lot in these days when the humanities are being challenged as passé and irrelevant.

Over the decades this journal has been open to all critical approaches, moods, and modalities, and has been well served—if we may say so ourselves—by a series of capable and respected editors. Things evolve, Dickens remains. We wish to thank our esteemed coeditor, Caroline Reitz—who has with our good wishes taken over as the executive editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection—for her companionship and dedication to Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction through Volume 51.

For this current volume, we once more express our gratitude for important and practical assistance received from the following administrators at CUNY’s Graduate Center: Interim Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Julia Wrigley, former Interim President James Muyskens; Ph.D. Program in English Executive Officer Kandice Chuh; and Nancy Silverman, Academic Program Coordinator, Ph.D. Program in English. Anna Metreveli in the Business Office continues to be the ablest of facilitators.

In addition, we extend thanks to Professor John O. Jordan, Director of the The Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Renee A. Fox, Co-Director; and Courtney Mahaney, Assistant Director of The Dickens Project. See also <http//dickens.uscs.edu>.

We gratefully acknowledge our indebtedness to Paris Shih, a doctoral student in English at the Graduate Center who was our editorial assistant during the early period when this issue was in formation and to his successor Katharine Williams for their consistently efficient and reliable help.

Finally, we thank the following members of the Journals Department at Penn State University Press for their encouragement, guidance, efficiency and support: Julie Lambert, Journals Manager; Astrid Meyer, Journals Managing Editor; and Rachel Lynn Ginder, Production Assistant and collaboratrice...