Contents: Introduction; Part I Books and Authors: From few and expensive to many and cheap: the British book market 1800-1890, Simon Eliot; A selected section from 'Authorship', Patrick Leary and Andrew Nash; Literary paupers and professional authors: the Guild of Literature and Art, Daniel Hack. Part II Serialization: Introducing the serial, Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund; A selected section from 'Marketing the Novel 1820-1850', Lee Erickson; 'Anti-Bleak House': advertising and the Victorian novel, Emily Steinlight. Part III Illustration: Dickens and the rise of the English illustrated novel after 1836, Jane R. Cohen; The art of seeing: Dickens in the visual market, Gerard Curtis. Part IV Circulation: The beginnings of a new type of popular fiction: plagiarisms of Dickens, Louis James; A selected section from 'Continental: Mainly Tauchnitz', Simon Nowell-Smith; The audience widens, Robert L. Patten. Part V Readers: Education, literacy and the Victorian reader, Jonathan Rose; Reading, prohibition and transgression, Kate Flint; A pulse of 124: Charles Dickens and a pathology of the mid-Victorian reading public, Helen Small.

Part VI Dickens as Editor: An interlude: 'daily nooses' and the noose itself, 1846, Michael Slater; Advertising fictions, Catherine Waters; Publishing and recalling life: All the Year Round (1859-1870), John M.L. Drew. Part VII Contemporaneity: The stolen child, Richard L. Stein; How Oliver Twist learned to read, and what he read, Patrick Brantlinger; The shipping intelligence: shipwrecks and secret tears from Dickens to Stoker, Matthew Rubery; 'The spirit of craft and money-making': the indignities of literature in the 1850s, Clare Pettitt; Dickens, invention and literary property in the 1850s, Trey Philpotts; Town talk: Dickens, Thackeray, and the policing of gossip, Patrick Leary. Part VIII Social, Cultural and Political Impact: Dickens, popular culture and popular politics in the 1830s: Oliver Twist, Sally Ledger; The amusements of the people: cultural politics, class, commerce, Juliet John; Conclusion, Sabine Clemm; 'Boz has got the town by the ear': Dickens and the Athenaeum critics, Ellen Miller Casey. Part IX Coda: From the Guardian books blog; Name index.