DICKENS`S NOVELS IN THE AGE OF IMPROVEMENT

This book historicizes the world of Dicken's later novels, relating them to the second half of the 19th century: to the modes of economic organization, thenew relationships between classes, the structures of thought and feeling, the new rhetoric of progress with its silences as well its emphases that came into existence as a result of the transition from the early, deeply troubled phase of the 19th century, to what has so often been called the 'Age of Improvement'.