19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

In this introduction to the Dickens and Science issue of 19, Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard consider the relationship between Dickens's writing, science and the Victorian literary imagination. Dickens’s response to scientific ideas was very often at the heart of his cherished ideal that literature should show ‘the romantic side of familiar things’, illuminating the wonder, even magic, of everyday phenomena for people of all classes, and affectively uniting them by relieving a shared thirst for imaginative succour.