Dickens is renowned for the richness of his visual imagination and his publications encouraged readers to interpret his words with and through their accompanying illustrations. Not only was Dickens deeply engaged with ideas of the visual in his writing, but his work has also provoked responses from artists across multiple disciplines within the Victorian period and beyond. The conference seeks to build on recent interdisciplinary work (such as that of Kate Flint and Isobel Armstrong) that illuminates nineteenth-century understandings of visual culture. By focusing the conference through a writer whose work is embedded in the visual imagination, Dickens will provide a test case for examining and theorizing the connection between text and image across two hundred years of cultural history.

We invite proposals for panels and individual papers from scholars across disciplines. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
 

The conference programme will also feature a reception at the Watts Gallery in nearby Compton, Surrey, to coincide with the gallery's exhibition Dickens and Art.