Dickens and the Children of Empire

Front Matter....Pages i-x
Introduction....Pages 1-12
Spirit and the Allegorical Child: Little Nell’s Mortal Aesthetic....Pages 13-28
Dickens and the Construction of the Child....Pages 29-42
Suppressing Narratives: Childhood and Empire in The Uncommercial Traveller and Great Expectations ....Pages 43-53
The Imperial Child: Bella, Our Mutual Friend, and the Victorian Picturesque....Pages 54-66
Dickens and ‘Gold Rush Fever’: Colonial Contagion in Household Words ....Pages 67-77
Floating Signifiers of Britishness in the Novels of the Anti-Slave-Trade Squadron....Pages 78-93
Dickens and the Native American....Pages 94-104
Nationalism and Violence: America in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit ....Pages 105-115
Girls Underground, Boys Overseas: Some Graveyard Vignettes....Pages 116-127
‘What the waves were always saying’: Dombey and Son and Textual Ripples on an African Shore....Pages 128-152
Savages and Settlers in Dickens: Reading Multiple Centres....Pages 153-172
Dickens in Africa: ‘Africanizing’ Hard Times ....Pages 173-183
Primitive and Wingless: the Colonial Subject as Child....Pages 184-202
Back Matter....Pages 203-211