This book examines Charles Dickens's fiction alongside publications emanating from Parliament. It argues that Dickens and Parliament were engaged in competitive efforts to represent the People at a crucial moment in the history of representative democracy--when the British government was under enormous political pressure to expand the franchise beyond a narrow band of male landowners. Contending that fiction and the literature of Parliament interacted at a host of levels--jostling one another in the same bookshops--it reads Dickens's novels in tandem with blue books, the practice texts of shorthand manuals, and Dickens's journalism. It shows how his fiction mocks parliamentary form (as in Pickwick Papers), canvasses the history of parliamentary representation (as in Bleak House), and depicts the relation of the People to the state as well as commerce (as in Little Dorrit). It thus rethinks the history of the Victorian novel by examining its rivalry with Parliament in the expanding world of print publication.

"This fascinating study blends history and biography, analyzing Charles Dickens's work and his wish to improve society." - S. A. Parker, CHOICE

"An American academic, Dr Carolyn Vellenga Berman, has had the fascinating idea of looking at Charles Dickens' novels alongside the publications of a Parliament expanding its horizons ... is a classic of evocative and satirical reporting." - Lord Cormack, The House

"Important new book on Dickens." - John M. L. Drew, Dickens Quarterly

"As Carolyn Vellenga Berman notes in the Coda to Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper, her focus is upon the ways in which 'Dickens's fiction illustrates how the national contours of an imagined community developed alongside both print-capitalism and attempts to define the People implicit in a representative form of government' (321). Emphasising Dickens's nature as 'an embedded writer' (133), profoundly immersed in and engaged with the institutions about which he wrote, Berman explores how his early experiences as a Parliamentary reporter laid a foundation for his fiction and the multiple ways in which it evolved an ongoing and 'complex interrogation' (3) of a rivalry to represent the People that developed between the claims of the legislature and the rapidly rising genre of the novel." - Iain Crawford, The Dickensian

"Berman's book tells a spellbinding but cautionary tale." - John M. L. Drew, University of Buckingham, Dickens Quarterly

"By examining the complex interactions of literary and political sources across Dickens's oeuvre and tracing the implications of these interactions for our understanding of the nineteenth-century representative system,...Vellenga Berman shows that the stakes were, and continue to be, very high indeed." - Katie Holdway, Victorian Periodicals Review

"Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper is nevertheless an extensive, fascinating, and important study - a complex ecosystem of recovered contexts - and essential reading for scholars of Dickens's life and writing and of the intellectual history of culture, reform politics, and Parliament in Britain during the long-nineteenth century." - British Association for Victorian Studies

"Charles Dickens's early career as a shorthand reporter of Parliamentary debates has long been familiar to scholars, but no one has paid it such close attention or worked through its implications in such detail as Carolyn Vellenga Berman does in Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper." - Ben Moore, English Studies

"Dickens and Democracy contributes greatly to understandings of Dickens,the politics of the Victorian novel, and the role of print culture in modern democracy. "[R]epresenting the People," Berman observes, "remains a vital and pressing challenge"" - Lanya Lamouria, Journal of British Studies

"Underlines just how much we can still learn today from Dickens and Parliament in the nineteenth century." - Catherine Waters, Victorian Studies