This article surveys Dickens scholarship in 2015, with attention to more than 170 monographs, collections, book chapters, and journal essays. The scholarship exhibits an increasing interest in intermediality studies (including intertextuality), “things” and “bodies,” ethical and moral analyses, and an intensifying revival of formal and textual-aesthetic interests, including treatments of style, mode, voice, characterization, form, and “beauty.” The scholarship surveyed is organized into the following categories: General Studies; Bibliographical Studies; Biographical Studies; Ethics; Aesthetics; Modes of Reading; Intermediality; Bodies; Childhood, Adulthood, Family; Environments; Empire; and Neo-Victorianism. It does not include web-based scholarship except for the cluster of articles published in the online journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century.

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The treatment of Estella in Dickens criticism has tended to replicate the ways she is explained by Pip and the other characters in the novel. This article reveals a more complex psychology in her by unpacking the significance of three of the novel's intertexts—The London Merchant, Hamlet, and Frankenstein—as those texts seem to have been received by mid-Victorian audiences. Reading the differences between the Estella revealed in this authorial intertextual commentary and the Estella produced by Pip's experiential narration reveals in Dickens a more complicated negotiation with gender ideology and a greater intuition of its destructive forces than he is generally credited with. The article thus suggests a way to understand more fully the complex relations to ideology found even in works traditionally considered “patriarchal” and to recuperate such figures as Estella, who exceed—while seeming to promulgate—the worst stereotypes of their eras.

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