Dickens and Race

the long version

In the first book-length study of its kind, Dickens and Race examines Dickens's complex relationship with race shaped by the twin poles of racial science and fancy. Examining the intersection of the lifelong influence of childhood favourites Robinson Crusoe and Tales of the Arabian Nights, and the African travel narratives for which the adult Dickens had a particular 'insatiable relish' with Dickens's interest in science, Dickens and Race offers a unique contextualisation of Dickens's fictional engagements with race in relation to his lesser-known journalism, with wider nineteenth-century debates about differences between humans, with issues of empire, and with the race shows of London. Dickens and Race will be useful to academics, postgraduates and undergraduates who are interested in Charles Dickens, Victorian studies, with racial difference and empire, and childhood.