In the opening chapters, Ledger establishes a number of connections between Dickens and the popular radicalism of the 1810s and 1820s, most notably with pamphleteer and provocateur William Hone. George Cruikshank, who illustrated several of Dickens's most popular works, provides the tangible link that connects the novelist and the radical journalist of an earlier generation. Cruikshank's playful yet pointed illustrations accompany a number of Hone's publications, including The Political House that Jack Built (1819), a corrosive satire of both government and monarchy. The spirit of this satire certainly survives in Dickens's novels, especially those of the 1850s, which are similarly caustic in their assessment of corrupt institutions and crooked individuals. Yet Ledger does not rest her argument solely upon the satiric affinity between the two writers nor the direct link that Cruikshank offers. She also argues that there are a number of shared scenes, situations, and character types that bind together Hone's pamphlets and poetry and Dickens's novels. A short but rich paragraph on Old Turveydrop from Bleak House, a character defined by his obsession with deportment and who names his son Prince in honor of the Prince Regent, shows how Dickens returns to the images and icons of popular radicalism to continue, extend, and renew the satiric assault of the rotten and ridiculous.

Satire is not the only thing Dickens draws from his popular radical forebears. Melodrama also connects Dickens to the earlier era of political tumult, and it is his skillful manipulation of the tropes and conventions of the genre that is perhaps the key to understanding his popularity. Through a series of readings, of both novels (Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Little Dorrit) and journalism, Ledger underlines Dickens's uncanny ability to bridge two understandings of the popular, one primarily political (the “people”) and another chiefly commercial (the mass-market-reading public). In doing so, Dickens was going against the grain. The commercial sense of the popular was in ascent, and, as a consequence, the political significance of the term had started to wane. Melodrama, with its focus on suffering, violence, and death, but also on reunions, revelations, and fortuitous turns of event, served as the ideal vehicle for the ongoing interrogation and critique of society's inequities and cruelties and the reanimation of the political sense of the popular. This is not to say, of course, that Dickens deployed melodramatic conventions without alteration. As Ledger concludes in her discussion of Oliver Twist, “in this as in all of his later novels Dickens interrogates and pushes at the boundaries of the melodramatic mode, at the same time as firmly committing himself to it” (105). What is sometimes misconstrued as Dickens's sentimentality is a precisely modulated popular voice, one that generates in its audience a sense not only of being part of a mass reading public, the reading material of which was being increasingly controlled and constrained by the logic of the market, but also of belonging to a larger body or group that supersedes this and is defined in terms of the continuity of popular traditions and the latent energy of popular protest.

Although Dickens serves as the gravitational center of Ledger's argument, she emphasizes that he was by no means alone in his inheritance of the vocabulary, imagery, and ideology of the popular radical tradition. The satirical journalism of Douglas Jerrold serves as a point of comparison for both Dickens and Ernest Jones. Ledger reveals Jerrold to be the most satirically astringent of the three, yet shows that Dickens and Jones likewise inherit the fire and force of popular radicalism. Ledger's assessment of Jones's fiction is particularly compelling. She sees in Jones a skilled writer of political melodrama and claims that “only Dickens, in his two great social novels of the 1850s, Bleak House and Little Dorrit, matches the sophistication of Jones's dialogue with the melodramatic mode” (161). This is a strong claim, but one completely borne out in Ledger's detailed reading of Jones's unfinished De Brassier (1851) and Woman's Wrongs (1852), a reading that should trigger a return to and reconsideration of Jones's fiction.

Needless to say, Ledger's work in Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination will be of immense interest to Dickens scholars, but it should also tempt a much wider range of readers interested in the history of political radicalism and the development of popular culture. Ledger provides illuminating readings of individual works by Dickens, but she also fundamentally alters our understanding of Dickens's political antecedents and affiliations. If Dickens's connection to the Regency period was hitherto understood primarily in terms of his admiration for Sir Walter Scott, and the competitive spirit Scott's novelistic achievements stoked in him, Ledger's book offers a different way of understanding the link between Dickens and the early nineteenth century. Likewise, in emphasizing Dickens's connection to those such as Jerrold and Jones, Ledger invites readers to resist the temptation to caricature Dickens as a middle-class liberal sentimentalist and to recognize instead a writer who was intrinsically linked to a history of popular radicalism and was a key player in the transformation of the popular, the radical, and of popular radicalism itself in the early to mid-Victorian era.