The first full-length study on the subject of Dickens and work, this lucidly written book provides a broader and more comprehensive account of it than has been previously attempted in shorter essays and chapters. Louttit reshapes our understanding of Dickens by challenging a critical oversimplification: that Dickens' attitude towards work reflects conventional expressions of Victorian earnestness of the sort attributed also to Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and even more simplistically, Samuel Smiles. Instead, through historically-informed close reading, Louttit shows that Dickens is not mainly interested in work as an abstract, positive value, or even in cataloguing it in concrete detail. What he explores instead is the human dimension of work: how, in other words, work affects the lives of those engaged in it. His writing about work is, as a result, best viewed not merely as a muffled echo of a quasi-religious Gospel of Work, nor as an objective sociological report, but rather as what Louttit terms a 'secular gospel'.