John Glavin offers both a performative reading of Dickens the novelist and an exploration of the potential for adaptive performance of the novels themselves. Through close study of text and context Glavin uncovers a richly ambivalent, often unexpectedly hostile, relationship between Dickens and the theater and theatricality of his own time, and shows how Dickens' novels can be seen as a form of counter performance. Yet Glavin also explores the performative potential in Dickens' fiction, and describes new ways to stage that fiction in emotionally powerful, critically acute adaptations.