Research Interests

• Victorian Culture and Literature
• Charles Dickens
• Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century British Literature

Recent Research Activities

"Metropolitan Improvements" in the Victorian City

Professional Activities

BOOKS

• The Companion to Dombey and Son. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 575 pages. September 2014 (UK); March 2015 (US and the rest of the world). Reviews in The Dickensian and Dickens Studies Annual.
• The Companion to Little Dorrit. Liverpool University Press, 2003. 560 pages. February 2003. Reviews in Times Literary Supplement, The Review of English Studies, Etudes Anglaises, Choice, Dickens Studies Annual, Dickens Quarterly, and The Dickensian, among other places.

ARTICLES

• “Dickens, the Flâneur, and Dickens's Journals: A Reconsideration.” Dickens Quarterly. 38 (March 2021): 54-69.
• "Dickens, Haussmann, and the Transformation of Paris." Nineteenth-Century Prose. 46 (Spring 2019): 97-122.
• “Dickens, the Metropolis and the Railway: Displacement or Progress?” Dickens Quarterly. 31 (December 2014): 334-42.
• “Dickens on Broadway: Future Dickens, Digital Dickens, Global Dickens—A Panel Discussion.” Transcript. Dickens Studies Annual. 43 (2012): 1-29.
• “Mad Bulls and Dead Meat: Smithfield Market as Reality and Symbol.” Dickens Studies Annual. 41 (2010): 25-44.
• “Dickens and Technology.” A Companion to Charles Dickens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 199-215.
• “Dickens, Invention, and Literary Property in the 1850s.” Dickens Quarterly. 24 (March 2007): 18-26.
• “The Everyman Dickens.” Dickens Quarterly. December 2003: 257-67.
• “Cavalletto: Italian Patriot?” Dickensian. Winter 2001: 214-19.
• “The 'Civil Service' and 'Administrative Reform': The Blame Game in Little Dorrit." Dickens Quarterly. 17 (March 2000): 14-21.      
• “The Year in Dickens: 1996.” Dickens Studies Annual. 27 (1998): 302-59.
• “Trevelyan, Treasury, and Circumlocution.” Dickens Studies Annual 22 (1994): 283-301.
• “Dickens, Patent Reform, and the Inventor: Daniel Doyce and the Question of Topicality.” Dickens Quarterly 9 (December 1992): 158-69. 
• “The Real Marshalsea.” The Dickensian 87 (Autumn 1991): 133-45.
• “`To Working Men’ and `The People’: Dickens’s View of Class Relations in the  Months Preceding Little Dorrit.” Dickens Quarterly 7 (June 1990): 262-75.

REPRINTS

• “Dickens, Invention, and Literary Property in the 1850s.” Dickens Quarterly. 24 (March 2007): 18-26. Rpt. Dickens and Victorian Print Cultures. Ed. Robert L. Patten. A Library of Essays on Charles Dickens. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012.
• “The Real Marshalsea.” Reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism (Gale).