Visiting the language, style, and poetry of Dickens' novels, this study reads these works as a form of poetry. Arguing that Dickens sees language as always double, it draws on Victorian texts and current critical theory to explore Dickens' interest in literature and popular song, and in jokes, caricature, word-play, and naming. Examining Dickens' key novels, Tambling uses caricature, the grotesque, exaggeration, comedy, and punning to show how Dickens writes a new poetry of the city, and that the language constitutes an unconscious and secret autobiography. This book takes Dickens scholarship in exciting new directions and will be of interest to nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies.

Jeremy Tambling is a writer and critic working on English and European literature and critical theory. He is formerly Professor of Literature at Manchester University, UK and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong.

Introduction: Urban Writing: Writing Poetry Part I: Writing Styles: Romantic and Baroque I. Dickens' Reading II. Dickens, Hogarth, and Caricature III. The Old Curiosity Shop Part II: Poetry and the City I. Pickwick Papers: Jingle and Weller II. 'Bragian Words': Martin Chuzzlewit III. Stopping Growing: Dombey and Son Part III: Opening Words I. Naming: Dombey and Son to Bleak House II. 'The Insistence of the Letter': Bleak House III. Staring in Little Dorrit IV. Novels of the 1860s Part IV: Dickens and the Poetry of Dreams I. The Mask II. The 'Waking Dream': Oliver Twist III. 'The Tempest' in David Copperfield IV. 'Scattered Consciousness': The Mystery of Edwin Drood