Recent Dickens Studies: 2022 Concluded

ABSTRACT This article (part 2 of two) surveys Dickens scholarship and adjacent work with a special emphasis on The Dickensian and Dickens Studies Annual. The author’s initial approach was inspired by the alternating micro- and macro-method of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Turning Point 1851. Part 2 of article identifies these key trends: (1) an interest in how nineteenth-century psychology, including trauma, affected Dickens work; (2) film, book, and stage adaptations and adaptation studies; (2) approaches to The Mystery of Edwin Drood; (3) interest in objects, things, places and spaces, including how places, objects and things can hold meaning; (4) intense, narrowly focused scholarship on topics like windows, paperweights, illustrations and correspondence, and again, “things” (5) controversies surrounding Dickens’s biography, especially Ellen Ternan (6) Dickens’s relationship with other authors, including William Makepeace Thackeray, William Harrison Ainsworth, George Eliot, and George Henry Lewes.