Charles Dickens sometimes referred to himself in correspondence as “The Inimitable,” and while it’s unclear whether this was meant to be straightforwardly hubristic or cheekily self-deprecating (knowing Dickens, it was probably both), the phrase has proven to be prescient. Dickens was an astonishingly prolific writer of journalism, fiction, letters, and plays; a mesmerizing performer of his own work; a passionate social critic, and the creator of some of the most memorable characters in the English language. So perhaps it goes without saying that the field open to the Dickens-focused researcher is deep and broad. Here is a guide to get you started.

Primary sources: Dickens wrote fourteen full-length novels (plus a good portion of an unfinished fifteenth, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which has spawned a cottage industry of potential endings), five Christmas novellas, many short stories and journalistic pieces (some comical, some melodramatic, some addressing social issues of his day), several theatrical works written for himself and his circle of friends to perform (Dickens was a talented actor who almost pursued a career on stage), and countless letters (including manuscript critiques from his time as a journal editor). Some of Dickens’ working journals, in which he outlined his novels and jotted down queries to ponder, also survive, along with extensive reworkings of his novels and stories that he created for his public readings. To borrow a line from Hamilton, Dickens wrote like he was running out of time. No Dickens researcher should feel obligated to read every word he wrote, but neither should any Dickens researcher attempt to write about him without making acquaintance with his work.

Other people’s reactions to Dickens are an important category of primary sources as well, including contemporary reviews of his works and accounts of his (literally?) mesmerizing performances at his public readings. You can find many of these quoted in secondary sources, but also check out historical periodicals databases, such as ProQuest’s British Periodicals Collection.

Contextual sources: Dickens undoubtedly helped to shape the Victorian period (the era spanning Queen Victoria’s reign, 1837-1903), but it also shaped him. Perhaps even more so, Dickens was marked by his childhood in the late Georgian period, which still contained elements of a pre-industrial “old England.” While Dickens’ works and especially his characters are often called “timeless,” he was a man of his time, and no serious Dickens researcher should ignore the historical and cultural contexts of his work. One of the best places on the internet to begin learning about 19^th-century England is the Victorian Web (victorianweb.org), a massive, well-maintained site that combines contributions from scholars and readers around the world. (It also contains some articles about the pre-Victorian context of Dickens’ early years.) It’s also a good idea to read writings by and about Dickens’ contemporaries, some of whom were his close comrades and collaborators (Wilkie Collins) and others who were at times closer to frenemies (William Thackeray).

Scholarly works: Though in his own day, Dickens was sometimes dismissed as merely a popular entertainer, it didn’t take long for scholarly literary criticism to latch onto him. You can find scholarly monographs on Dickens through the lens of crime, the theater, the city of London, and many other topics. There are also many good biographies of Dickens, and while all will give you the same basic facts, each of the best ones has its own angle that makes it worth reading. (As one example, take Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens, which includes a number of interludes that imagine Dickens as a character in his own novels.) Dickens scholarship is regularly published in journals such as Victorian Studies and Dickens Quarterly, the official publication of the Dickens Society.

Fan productions: Not everyone who is a devoted reader and careful observer of Dickens is a scholar with a PhD and access to channels of peer-reviewed publication, and thus researchers should not ignore the productions of fans. While the word “fan” itself might be anachronistic in the context of Dickens, the phenomenon of fandom is not; Dickens’ serial novels had people lining up outside booksellers eager to get their hands on the next installment, and his public appearances (especially during his 1842 American tour and his famous readings later in life) filled auditoriums with people desperate to get a glimpse of him. Dickens’ fans range from prominent 20^th-century writers such as G. K. Chesterton (who also wrote some “legitimate” scholarly work on Dickens) to the contributors on the Charles Dickens thread on fanfiction.net (there are quite a few). While the world of fan-produced writing is a bit of a Wild West, requiring the researcher to apply non-traditional methods of assessing credibility, research in this realm can yield exciting results.

Adaptations: Dickens may be the most adapted writer of all time. People were adapting his work even before he finished writing his first novel—the loose (indeed, almost non-existent) copyright laws of the time, and the fact that Dickens published his novels in serial, allowed unscrupulous publishers and low-brow theater impresarios (not that Dickens had anything against low-brow theater as such) to come out with speculative endings to his works before Dickens himself had a chance to finish the stories. The tradition of adapting Dickens’ work for the page (see recent novels such as Drood and Death and Mr. Pickwick), the stage, and eventually the screen has continued, and the various interpretations of his characters and stories can provide the researcher with nuanced insights. Besides that, many of them are purely fun to read or watch. Dickens’ works, with their visually abundant settings and the exaggerated mannerisms of many of the characters, lend themselves particularly well to theater and film.

This brief guide has barely begun to plumb the depths of knowledge available to the Dickens researcher. May it introduce you to a lifelong friend.