Dickens's social concern has always been recognized as important to his fiction, but this is the first study to focus specifically upon the representation of class consciousness in his novels. Dr Morris's detailed research on influential Victorian journals demonstrates the inherently dialogic quality of Dickens's writing - the continuous interaction between the language of his texts and the language of class articulated in the era. This re-articulation of the political contemporaneity of the novels reveals the marginal perspective they contain and offers new insight into the developing rhetorics of competitive individualism, class interpellation, and control of urban discontent.