'Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition' is a timely study of the 'sentimental' in Dickens's novels, which re-evaluates his presentation of emotion as part of a complex literary tradition that enables him to critique nineteenth-century society.

Introduction; Chapter 1: Dickens and the Sentimentalist Tradition; Chapter 2: Sentimentalism and its Discontents in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Fielding, Richardson and Sterne; Chapter 3: Sentimentalism and its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century Drama: Goldsmith and Sheridan; Chapter 4: Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Drama; Chapter 5: The Early Novels and 'The Vicar of Wakefield'; Chapter 6: The Later Novels; Conclusion: The Afterlife of Sentimentalism

Valerie Purton is Reader in Victorian Literature at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.