'Something strangely mixed': a study of the comic modes of Charles Dickens

This thesis asserts the importance of Dickensian comic modes. It engages with academic discourse and popular culture which between them have formulated a serious, socially engaged and psychologically dramatic Dickens in which comedy is muted. It examines the nature of Dickens's comedy and his debt to traditions of comic writing. It attempts to construct an understanding of Dickens in which comic modes are as vital as the dramatic to our understanding of Dickens's methods, themes and purposes. It adopts an inclusive approach to methodology in recognition of the wide-ranging nature of Dickensian comedy, deploying theorisations of the comic in the context of a Marxist approach to nineteenth-century modernity. It asserts the importance of the tradition of comic quixotic fiction in which Dickens can be seen to have written. It demonstrates that Dickens developed an individual response to the nature of emergent modernity that can be distinguished by contrast with other theorisations of the comic from the period. It examines distinctive Dickensian comic formulations of comic characterisation and the equally distinctive nature of Dickensian comic language and satire.