This is the first full-length study of the treatment of women in Dickens' novels to make use of modern critical approaches. It replaces traditional biographical methods with a new linguistic model which directs attention back to the texts. Patricia Ingham's innovatory approach characterises Dickens' novelistic language by relating it to linguistic representations of women in contemporary non-fictional works (handbooks on womanly conduct, documentary works on prostitution, and Florence Nightingale's Cassandra). This analysis reveals that Dickens' individual account of the womanly ideal is shot through with contradiction. Fallen women are both degraded and valuable, worthless and powerful; 'ideal' women are desirable and undesirable, passive and destructive of the very social structure they are supposed to sustain. The book's conclusion is that the ambiguous struggle between convention and dissent in the language he uses for representing women charges Dickens' novels with their uneasy excitement and power.