Sally Ledger. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-84577-9. Price: US$104 (£53.00)

Early on the morning of January 22, 2009, I sat down at my computer to begin my day in the now routine fashion of most academics—by attending to my email. At the top of my priorities list was to write to RaVoN to inform the editors that my review of Sally Ledger's new book was nearly complete and would soon be wending its electronic way to the journal well in advance of the (revised) deadline. I noticed that I had several messages waiting to be read. The very first email I opened was about a nascent research group on Dickens and Science, which mentioned Sally's name as someone who had been one of the first to sign on as member. The next in my queue was from a colleague in my own department and, as if in concert with the morning's theme, had "Sally Ledger" as its subject line. When I opened it, I learned that Sally had died, suddenly and without warning, the night before. As the news spread and messages echoing shock and sadness appeared throughout the day, the impact she had on so many people became ever more apparent. As a student, colleague, mentor, friend, Sally’s generosity of spirit, the tenacity of her will, and the breadth of her intellect set her apart. Even those who had never met Sally remarked on how much her passing would affect the Victorianist community. I did not know Sally well—we had shared a meal or two as part of a larger group, had chatted once or twice over drinks at receptions, and had been in residence at the Dickens Project together on two separate occasions. Thus, I was a bit taken aback by how deeply I was touched by her death. More than saddened by the loss of someone in her prime, someone whom I knew to be a devoted mother and partner, someone loved and respected by so many, I felt as though I had lost a close, cherished friend, someone I knew much better than I seemed to know Sally Ledger. When I returned to the draft of my review of Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination some time later, I realized that the loss I was feeling had been fostered at least partly by the time I had spent with this book. In my own mind I had been engaging with Ledger, and imagined that I had gained some insight into her methods of analysis, her intellectual passions, and her humor. Rightly or wrongly, I felt I knew Sally Ledger better for having read her book. Direct to a fault in its prose, her study is unabashedly historicist and sets out to reclaim Dickens for popular radical culture, flying directly in the faces of a host of literary historians and critics, beginning with Humphrey House. Ledger insists on rescuing Dickens from the suffocating embrace of the middle classes and their legacy of well-meaning, if often ineffectual, critique. As she says, though she would admit the importance of such radical antecedents to Dickens as W.J. Fox, William Howitt, and Percy Bysshe Shelly, she also wants “simultaneously to propose an altogether less respectable, more truly disruptive, more popular radical genealogy” (2; original emphasis). She begins this reclamation project by focusing on two of the terms upon which her argument rests: “popular” and “radical.” Fully aware of the vexed history of the usage of each, Ledger carefully plots out her position. For instance, she tells us that she follows “Arnold Kettle in closely allying ‘popular’ literature to a political concept of ‘the People.’” This is especially important in understanding the …