Carlyle's view of modern life as a palimpsest serves as a postulate for his Victorian contemporaries and successors, who make it into the defining idea of the modern city. Following Carlyle's lead, they explore the urban palimpsest, yet nor for them is his prophetic voice of guilt and punishment. Rather, in exploring the uneasy pleasures in the juxtaposition of the urban layers of modern experience, in The Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend and other novels Dickens strikes the modern note of the attraction of repulsion as well as shifting, alternating, alternative realities. The boundaries of class and species are honeycombed by pathways which hum with traffic and constant crossings of the layers of the palimpsest of modern urban life, and the reader navigates among unstable places together with the narrators who are often split and divided along the fault lines of urban life.

In the sesquicentennials of Darwin's The Origin of Species and Mill's On Liberty, determinism and freedom returned to grand and popular narrative. NeoDarwinian books like The Literary Animal (2005) and Madame Bovary's Ovaries (2005) returned us via evolutionary psychology or E. O. Wilson's socio-biology to a universal human nature based in genes and reproduction. Whereas Habermasians grounded freedom and constraint solely in community and communication, NeoDarwinians reduced human decisions to reproductive instincts. Then 2010 saw the tenth anniversary of the completed human genome sequence, and reductive conceptions of the genome were rife. Confronted with such reductionisms, we are challenged to maintain a more complex understanding of the interworkings of nature and culture in species self-formation. This essay does so by reconsidering the methods of the philosophical anthropologists who valued the human capacities for freedom and choice, self-creation, and self-formation, within natural limits and constraints. In the complex workings of nature and culture, humans cannot be reduced to genes or reproductive strategies, nor can they be reduced to mere cultural constructs. The philosophical anthropologists studied the way culture and technology mediated biological nature, and vice versa, the way nature mediated culture and technology. When they wanted to know what humankind was, they looked at the history of its interactions with nature. Through that history, they saw its capabilities and limits. There was no essence of humankind outside its historical existence, and the ability to reflect on that history opened the world to ideal goals. This empirical or historical ontology that asked what kinds of creatures humans were at home in both nature and their diverse cultures was at its height in the mid-nineteenth century and is only now returning after a century and a half of reductions to either nature or culture. From geneticists to meteorologists, scientists are looking at the ways in which culture interacts with the environment at both molecular and global levels. They write of onto-genetic or developmental niches in which nature is nurtured as the product of mutually influencing genes and environment. The terms they use are Emergence, post-genomics, and the new epigenesis. My contention is that cutting-edge science today is much closer to the pre-disciplinary sciences of the mid-nineteenth century than we have seen for 150 years and that when reading the Victorians we should celebrate their epistemic pluralism and diversity. We should celebrate the uneasy pleasures of knowing that we are both nature and culture, free, but only within limits. Dickens was characteristically knowledgeable of the science of his time, and his work shows the scope and limits of the human animal as conceived in the 1850s. I use Little Dorrit to demonstrate this because it is a novel about limits and constraints. I present my argument in the form of four theses on Nature, culture, technology, and hope, and I claim that these not only reflect the science of Dickens's time but also of our own.

This essay examines the implications of Dickens's statement in the preface to the one-volume edition of Bleak House (September 1853) that in the novel he "purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things." This claim, I argue, goes to the core of Dickens's art as a writer, an art that combines the presentation of disturbing news about the contemporary state of society with a skilful attempt to provide narrative pleasure, pleasure designed to ensure that the narrator retains his hold over readers for 67 chapters. Dickens's achievement, I conclude, constitutes literary art of the highest order, one that instructs readers in social and ethical truths while also delighting them and holding their attention in the course of telling a compelling story.

At the end of A Christmas Carol, the Last of the Spirits points its finger towards "One" gravestone, upon which Ebenezer Scrooge can read his own name. His vexing question is whether he has seen "the shadows of things that Will be" or "the shadows of Things that May be, only"; he takes a solemn oath that he will "sponge away the writing" on the stone. At the end of The Tragedy of King Lear, Lear appears howling, with the dead Cordelia in his arms. He puts a looking-glass to her mouth and declares that, if she lives, "[i]t is a chance which does redeem all sorrows" he has ever felt. At the beginning of his Sickness unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard claims that to be "sick unto death is, not to be able to die - yet not as though there were hope of life"; "when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die". This paper examines the question of death via juxtaposing Dickens's and Shakespeare's respective texts in a Kierkegaardian framework. Is it possible to face the death of one's self at all? Or is it only the death of someone whom one loves most which reveals the meaning of death (and life)? Is death a part of life, or does a "living death" permeate our whole life? How can watching people die in a tragedy be elevating? Or is it the muting of death, as in comedy, which liberates us to live?

In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens uses physiognomy as an indirect way of portraying characters that observe their fellow-characters rather than as a direct means of portraying the characters observed. This reading of faces often constitutes misinterpretation: Dickens links Our Mutual Friend to the issue of reading itself, providing models of reader response. Misreadings thus become morally and aesthetically relevant to the overall structure and effect of the novel.

Dickens's depictions of dance are usually read as manifestations of the jovial fun-loving aspect of his fiction. In what is arguably the most famous depiction of dance in the early works, the Fezziwigs' ball in A Christmas Carol, Dickens not only uses the dance to suggest all the positive values associated with good feeling and sociability - the very things missing from Scrooge's life - but also allows his prose to echo the actual rhythm of the dance, so that sound and sense work together to convey the message to both the reader and Scrooge that dancing is a pleasurable, life-affirming, socially positive activity. This paper explores the complex social and literary implications of Dickens's presentation of dance, especially in the fiction that he wrote during the 1840s. While Dickens's juxtaposition of dancing and social misery antedates the 1840s, the paper concentrates on the ways in which Dickens's works of that period, primarily A Christmas Carol and The Battle for Life, depict dance as simultaneously a life-affirming activity and a deflection of the decade's more serious social, medical and economic ills.

The paper argues that, well aware of the developments in contemporary science, including biology and political economy, Dickens believed in the significance of the scientific paradigm shifts for ordinary human life. Dickens's early fiction constituted, among other things, a passionate critique of para-Malthusian political economy. This critique is resumed in Our Mutual Friend, yet with the new awareness of the shift of dominant paradigms from political economy to Darwinist biological thinking. Whereas the legislature that grew out of political economy could be challenged and modified, Darwin's account of natural selection, a biological theory that had permanent ontological ramifications, had a claim to the stability of a natural law which disabled beliefs in Providential design. Darwin's work, however, did not deny the potential of benevolent sympathetic human agency. Dickens's novel pits such agency against the blind forces of the struggle for survival, even while subverting the confidence in overall ethical design trailed in by the residual elements of the traditional melodrama.

A survey of the models constructed in the articles of this special issue to explain the compatibility of, on the one hand, the entertainment value and the aesthetic pleasure yielded by Dickens's works and, on the other hand, their consciousness-raising social agenda.

The article argues that Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby contains a number of elements taken from Frances Trollope's anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Life of the Mississippi. In detaching Trollope's images and language from the setting of plantation culture, Dickens creates a story that is permeated with the feelings of abolitionist literature without being tied to a single political aim.

This essay concerns the connection between literature and reality. It argues that the existence of such a connection is made possible by the dual role of social practice in founding, on the one hand, human reality (including character), and on the other, linguistic meaning. While an author is free to determine such matters as plot or imagery under the control of nothing stronger than general plausibility and verisimilitude, a far stronger constraint from the side of reality comes into play the moment he sets about deploying the resources of a natural language, which is not his private property but a public possession, whose possibilities of meaning stand before him independently of his wishes, already richly charged with references, both historic and contemporary, to the structures of practice constitutive of the social order from which it has emerged, and the complexities of whose daily intercourse on all levels it serves to mediate. In developing these themes, the essay explores the relationships between fairy tale, language, and reality in Our Mutual Friend, and the way in which Dickens' language mediates between our "uneasy" sense that, on the one hand, we are reading a fairy tale, or rather a set of interwoven fairy tales, and on the other hand, that the novel is, nevertheless, in some sense a work of "realism," though not at all concerned with "social reality" in any sense seriously analogous to, say, Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. The title and the epigraph pick up a passage in Cynthia Ozick's early novel Trust: "here was a man who shunned novels on the ground that they were always fiction."

The paper demonstrates that Dickens's Our Mutual Friend complicates any attempt to differentiate between aesthetic enjoyment and social awareness in reader response. It isolates three models of reading in which the interconnection between aesthetic effect and consciousness-raising effect is associated with the entanglements between person and thing, animate and inanimate, living and dead, subject and object of perception. These entanglements destabilize the grounds on which we would usually differentiate between aesthetic pleasure and social critique.

This essay addresses the paradox of Dickens as an urban writer through exploration of his narrative space. On the one hand, like Mayhew, Engels, and other Victorian urban explorers, Dickens is a fierce critic of the social ills of the industrial metropolis. On the other hand, Dickens is ranked alongside Baudelaire and Benjamin as the creator of a new vocabulary for urban pleasures, such as flânerie, consumption, visual distraction, and psychological stimulation. This ambiguity of Dickens' urban attitudes is encapsulated in the doubleness of his urban chronotope. The city of Dickens is often imaged in vertical terms as the dichotomously divided space of the rich and the poor. But equally often, it is structured horizontally as a maze, network, or ring of contagion that unites all the city dwellers in a complex ecology of mutual interdependence. These two axes of representation correspond to the two types of urban involvement, that of the reformer and of the flâneur. In Bleak House they are epitomized by the omniscient narrator's "bird's eye" view of society and Esther's "street level" vision of it. The essay explores the tension and interaction between the detached aesthetics of flânerie and the passionate involvement of social reform in the narrative fabric of Dickens's world. It analyzes the narrative architecture of Bleak House by focusing on the techniques of vision and focalization rather than on the novel's thematic concerns and/or characters' actions.

The article focuses on the aggressor-victim paradigms upon which Dickens builds three of his female characters in Great Expectations: Mrs. Joe Gargery, Miss Havisham, and Molly. Usually described as monstrous, the three characters are here discussed in terms of the hidden motives of their strange behavior, one of the sources of uneasy pleasures in the reading process. Viewed from the feminist standpoint, the representation of the three characters is associated with Victorian views concerning the treatment of women, sexuality, crime, and marriage; viewed in psychological terms, all the three display symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, wit the roles of victim and aggressor shifting over time.

This essay examines the pleasure of the text in Dickens's novel Hard Times (1854) and considers the risks it takes in its performance as a novel in a utilitarian economy. Walking a tightrope between employing the genre as an agent of social change and entertaining middle-class readers, Dickens fuses homo ludens with homo faber. The sheer pleasure of reading must be shown to be useful, yet the novel has not proven popular until recent years and its moral message does not wear will in a postmodern hedonistic culture. Nevertheless, imagination as means as well as metaphor must be tested by its success, and the author, like Mr Jupe, cannot afford to miss a trick.