Authors in Context examines the work of major authors in relation to their own times and to the present day. Combining history with lively literary discussion, each volume provides comprehensive insight into texts in their context. Charles Dickens was both a representative Victorian and an artist who is quintessentially a 'Post-Romantic'. He was the most popular author of his age and the one who most vividly reflected the contradictory impulses of Victorian society, its energy and invention as much as its social and political anomalies. This book explores Dickens's interest in the urban phenomenon which so marks nineteenth-century culture, and it looks at the vital interconnection between his life and his art. Like his character, David Copperfield, Dickens lived his life and pursued his career 'thoroughly in earnest', but he was also a great comic writer whose work resonates well beyond his own age and continues to be recontextualized on the stage, on film, and on television.