This collection explores the still underrepresented topics of sex, erotics and desire in the work of Charles Dickens. Contributors draw upon and suggest new points of convergence between a wide range of theoretical perspectives including cultural phenomenology, materialism, new historicism, critical race studies, feminist and queer theory. Analysis of a broad range of Dickens's fiction, journalism and correspondence demonstrates Dickens's sustained commitment to exploring a diverse range of

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... al matters throughout his career. Dickens studies, especially in Britain, remain dominated by a conventional criticism too often reluctant to acknowledge the diversity of this alleged champion of 'respectable' fiction. Despite important interventions, notably from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Joss Lutz Marsh and William A. Cohen, a chimera persists of Dickens as foremost proponent of Victorian ideologies of marriage and domesticity. 1 As Cohen's article for this collection observes, pursuing the sex in Dickens can still appear to some as a perverse reading practice. John Schad's 1996 collection Dickens Refigured: Bodies, Desires and Other Histories calls for a 'refigur[ing of] this most central of Victorian authors through attention to all that makes his work so eccentric'. 2 Schad's too rarely-heeded challenge is taken up variously by the essays in this collection. A number of critical positions are here brought into debate with each other to negotiate the significance and validity of different approaches to Dickens and sex, and nineteenth-century studies more broadly. As well as offering new readings of Dickens's writings, the articles also explore aspects of the wider political and theoretical investments at play in current critical debates about both Dickens and sexuality. This collection particularly interrogates the ramifications as well as