Research

Illustration by John Leech of Ebenezer Scrooge and Marley's Ghost in A Christmas Carol (1843)

Learn More about Charles Dickens and His World!

Below are listed the prominent organizations, journals, institutional archives and collections, and digital projects in the field of Dickens Studies.

Most are accessible (open-access, etc.) to independent scholars and Dickens enthusiasts as well as students and faculty at various levels, but others may require a subscription fee or institutional access.

To propose an addition to this list, please email the moderator Dr. Lydia Craig at lecraig@eiu.edu.

    • 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 1800s.

    • The Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth allows visitors to tour the house where the author was born.

    • The Dickens Fellowship. Founded in 1902, this is the oldest worldwide association of Dickensians, sponsoring reading groups, charity events, and an annual conference.

    • 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.

    • The Dickens Project. Located at UC Santa Cruz, this popular project established in 1981 curates an annual experience of Dickens study and various other local events and facilitates a Dickens consortium of participating institutions.

    • The Dickensian is the journal of the Dickens Fellowship and is published three times a year; its digital archive is also accessible online to members on the Dickens Fellowship’s website.

    • Dickens Quarterly: Journal of The Dickens Society, DQ publishes scholarship on Dickens's life, times, literary output, criticism, translation, adaptation, and other relevant subjects. Recent issues are in ProQuest (institutional-access), while older ones are archived on JSTOR, which offers independent researchers free access to one hundred articles per month.

    • Dickens Studies Annual. Founded in 1970, DSA publishes articles on Dickens and subjects relating to the Victorian era and Nineteenth-Century Studies.

    • 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 Fitzgerald Collection at Midway Archives Centre contains multiple items relating to Dickens’s life and works.

    • 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).