A lively and accessible introduction for general readers, students, teachers, and academics.

Jon Mee was educated at Newcastle University and the University of Cambridge. After a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford, he took up his first permanent position at the Australian National University. He returned to the University of Oxford to take up the Margaret Candfield Fellowship in English at University College and a post in the Oxford English Faculty. He moved to the University of Warwick in 2007 and then took his current position as Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York in October 2013.

Preface; Chronology; 1. Dickens the entertainer: 'people must be amuthed'; 2. Dickens and language: 'what I meantersay'; 3. Dickens and the city: 'animate London ... inanimate London'; 4. Dickens, gender, and domesticity: 'be it ever ... so ghastly ... there's no place like it'; 5. Adapting Dickens: 'he do the police in different voices'; Further reading.