Punch's Mr. Dunup is indeed in an awful position. Having fled to France to escape his English creditors, he finds himself in the midst of the French Revolution of 1848. The question that he must answer – what is worse, revolution in France or bankruptcy in England? – is one that preoccupied Victorians at midcentury, when a wave of European revolutions coincided with the domestic financial crisis of 1845–48. In classic accounts of nineteenth-century Europe, 1848 is remembered as the year when a crucial contest was waged between political revolution, identified with the Continent, and capitalism, identified with Britain. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the failure of the 1848 revolutions to effect lasting political change ushered in “[t]he sudden, vast and apparently boundless expansion of the world capitalist economy”: “Political revolution retreated, industrial revolution advanced” (2). For mid-nineteenth-century Britons, however, the triumph of capitalism was by no means assured. In what follows, I look closely at how Victorian journalists and novelists imagined the British financial crisis of the 1840s after this event was given new meaning by the 1848 French Revolution. Much of this writing envisions political revolution and the capitalist economy in the same way as the Punch satirist does – not as competing ideologies of social progress but as equivalent forms of social disruption. As we will see, at midcentury, the ongoing financial crisis was routinely represented as a quasi-revolutionary upheaval: it was a mass disturbance that struck terror into the middle classes precisely by suddenly and violently toppling the nation's leading men and social institutions.

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This essay surveys the 2016 scholarship on Dickens, summarizing over 150 monographs, collections, book chapters, and journal articles. The essay's twelve sections emphasize major areas of scholarly interest: General Studies; The Environment; The Transnational; Religion and Morality; Bodies and Things; Gender and Sexuality; Genre and Form; Linguistics; Periodical Culture, Popular Culture, and Authorship; Adaptation; Pedagogy; and Biography. As this list demonstrates, recent Dickens studies encompass a variety of contemporary thematic preoccupations and methodologies. In 2016, research informed by environmental and transnational approaches was especially vibrant.

This essay reads Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) as a previously unrecognized contribution to Victorian discourses around democracy. Approaching the novel through the parliamentary reform debate of the late 1850s and through Dickens's earlier writings about American democracy, I argue that this historical narrative of the French Revolution elaborates Victorian liberals’ fears that democracy will, on one hand, devalue individuality and produce a world of sameness or, on the other, overvalue individual sovereignty, giving way to isolating difference and social fragmentation. Despite his deep ambivalence about democratic reform, Dickens uses the novel to imagine alternative forms of political representation. The motif of “echoing footsteps” is one key example of the utopian democratic fantasy that the novel develops. In the “echoing footsteps” passages, Dickens appropriates the theories of Charles Babbage for political purposes, proposing that the earth's atmosphere is a medium that contains a complete democratic record of all the sounds made by every individual in existence. In this respect, the novel anticipates a concept of democracy as individual expression that today increasingly threatens democratic institutions.