Dickens Studies Research

Dickens Membership and Museums:

• The Charles Dickens Museum. Visitors to this location can can tour 48 Doughty Street, Dickens’s London home between 1839-1839, and various events focusing on the author’s life and experience of the city in the nineteenth century. In Portsmouth, The Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum allows visitors to tour the house where the author was born.
• The Dickens Fellowship. Members of this world-famous organization founded in 1902 can write for and receive The Dickensian (a journal whose articles are also accessible online to members) and are able to attend global Fellowship events.
• The Dickens Project. Located at UC Santa Cruz, this popular project curates an annual experience of Dickens study and various other local events and facilitates a Dickens consortium of participating institutions.
• The Dickens Society. First set up in 1970, the centenary of Dickens’s death, this society holds an annual symposium and encourages the study of Dickens’s life, times, and literary output.
• Dickens Quarterly. This journal of The Dickens Society publishes scholarship on Dickens’s life, times, literary output, criticism, translation, adaptation, and other relevant subjects.
• Dickens Studies Annual. Founded in 1970, DSA publishes articles on Dickens and subjects relating to the Victorian era.

Textual Research:

• The British Newspaper Archive, which offers individual subscriptions, contains many newspapers that feature Dickens’s writings or reviews of his literary output. 
• The Charles Dickens Letters Project. This online, searchable resource is dedicated to publishing, free of charge, all the correspondence of Charles Dickens which has come to light since 2002, the year in which the final volume of the Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens was published.
• The Charles Dickens Museum. By prearrangement, visitors to 48 Doughty Street can access the museum’s library of over 100,000 manuscripts and other items.
• CLiC Dickens (a concordance of all of Dickens’s novels that also allows you to search specifically for quotations, non-quotations, and suspensions).
• The Dickens Code: (a project endeavoring to use research and crowd-sourcing to interpret Dickens’s shorthand manuscripts).
• Dickens Journals Online. Search the complete run of Dickens’s weekly magazines Household Words and All the Year Round. 
• Dickens Library Online: a digital reconstruction of Dickens’s lifetime library.
• Dickens Search is an Omeka project aiming to collect Dickens’s literary works for cross-searching. It holds the most comprehensive collection of Dickens’s poetry yet assembled and has nearly completed the short fiction.
• Digital Dickens Notes: Color transcriptions of Dickens’s working notes for David Copperfield and Bleak House, which are held in the V&A’s National Art Library, preserve Dickens’s use of space and non-textual markings while making the notes legible, accessible, and searchable for scholars and students. They are presented with critical introductions and detailed editorial annotations, the product of detailed archival research, to provide an immersive engagement with Dickens’s compositional practice.
• Discovering Dickens (Stanford University site, where readers can download Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, or Hard Times in the original numbers, with notes and commentary.
• The Free Library of Pennsylvania boasts a significant Dickens collection located in its Rare Books Department.
• Google Books, HathiTrust and Internet Archive contain hundreds of scanned editions of Dickens’s works.
• The Morgan Library & Museum holds an extensive collection of Dickens’s correspondence and other related documents and manuscripts.
• The New York Public Library has the Charles Dickens Collection of Papers, the majority of which has been digitized.
• V&A, Charles Dickens (the V&A have most of Dickens’s manuscripts, and there are digitised versions of Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities and The Mystery of Edwin Drood available). Other digitised manuscripts, such as Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol, held at The Morgan Library & Museum, can be found in the digital collections of global libraries.
• Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Project Boz (includes scanned original numbers of several Dickens novels, some with searchable PDFs (led by Dickens Society member, Joel J. Brattin).

Visual and Biographical Resources:

• The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery: This resource from Michael John Goodman of the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive features the original illustrations from Dickens’s 15 novels.
• Internet Archive and YouTube host 20th and 21st-century Dickens film adaptations.
• Victorian Web, Charles Dickens Page presents images and documents, including entire books, as nodes in a network of detailed connections that explore context.
• David Perdue’s Charles Dickens Page contains teaching resources, context, glossaries, illustrations, a timeline and more.
• Dickens Live boasts a chronology of Dickens’s life, offering a detailed timeline of Dickens’s movements and literary production to 1842.
• The Dickens Page has a collection of useful links.
• John Forster’s landmark three volume Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74), published a few years after the author’s death in 1870, is available through the Japan Chapter of the Dickens Fellowship.
• Dickens in Context: The British Library’s site explores a range of Dickensian themes such as poverty and wealth, childhood, prisons, and industrialisation.
• The New York Public Library offers an illustrated presentation on Charles Dickens: The Life of the Author by Kenneth Benson.
• UC Santa Cruz’s Dickens Project features online bibliographies, articles, and an exceptionally helpful page for teacher resources.

• Recent issues of Dickens Quarterly are in ProQuest (institutional-access), while older ones are archived on JSTOR, which offers independent researchers free access to one hundred articles per month.
• Academics upload papers to open-access social networking sites such as Researchgate and Academia.edu. Searching Google Scholar is a helpful way to find the locations of articles, though access is not always guaranteed.

• BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History contains free, searchable, peer-reviewed, easy-to-use overviews of events within the period 1775-1925.
• COVE (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education): A scholar-driven open-access platform that publishes both peer-reviewed material and “flipped classroom” student projects built with online tools.
• Digital Cruikshank: this database contains illustrations by Cruikshank held in the library of UMBC.
• Mapping Emotions in Victorian London is a crowdsourced project that invites participants to analyse emotions in Victorian fiction.
• One More Voice: this work of digital humanities scholarship focuses on recovering non-European contributions from nineteenth-century British imperial and colonial archives.
• Price One Penny is a database which catalogues early Victorian penny fiction and enables easy access to surviving copies and accurate bibliographic information.
• Teaching Transatlanticism provides resources for teaching nineteenth-century Anglo-American print culture.
• Victorian Research Web acts as a guide to research resources online, including archives, research guides, and tips on planning research trips.
• Victorian Serial Novels: Reading Like a Victorian. This site allows readers to gain easy access to parts of Victorian novels in the order in which they were published in the nineteenth century. Users can navigate to a particular month and year to read installments of novels that came out simultaneously.
• UK Reading Experience Database is a searchable database that records reading tastes and habits from 1450-1945.
• Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom: This peer-reviewed digital humanities project  reimagines how to teach Victorian Studies through a positive, race-conscious lens.