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The purpose of this paper is to provide a profile of the novelist Charles Dickens.

Several biographies and articles about the life of Charles Dickens were examined, to see if there was evidence that he experienced mental health problems.

While Dickens has been acclaimed for his ability to authentically portray the living conditions of the poor in the nineteenth-century Britain, there is comparatively little historical record of the fact that he may have experienced bipolar disorder. This paper suggests that he displayed many of the characteristic symptoms of bipolar.

The story of Dickens’ own childhood is an amazing example of personal resilience. It no doubt enhanced the quality of his writing, but it may also have “sown the seeds” of a later mental illness.

So much attention has been focused on the colourful characters from Dickens’ novels, but little on the problems of the man himself.

The story of Charles Dickens is as fascinating as any of the fictional characters he created, if not even more intriguing. His story confirms the link between writers, creativity and mood disorders.

Given the huge attention and worldwide acclaim paid to the books of Charles Dickens, which have inspired numerous films as well as musicals, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the author himself and his struggles with mental illness.

The subject of a recent MA thesis in Library and Information Studies is the development of a prototype scholars workstation for presentation of materials, in a hypermedia format, from the Dickens House Museum Library, London. Type and number of materials is provided. Basic hypertext features and authoring attributes of the hypermedia software used, Guide 3.0 for Windows, are described and the time factors inherent in research, planning and development of such a project are emphasized. Elements of screen design are described and presentation of textual and visual materials are provided with accompanying illustrations of navigational pathways. Testing of the prototype is described, including the test sample, the questionnaire and evaluation form, and brief conclusions.

The accounts of moral reform that nineteenth-century convicts offered the officials in charge were frequently characterized by such uniformity that it caused Dickens to mistrust their sincerity and to brand them scornfully as “pattern penitence.” Unlike Dickens, however, prison officials were more willing to credit the questionable authenticity of “patterned” repentance. The paper argues that rather than an effect of personal gullibility, reformers’ attitudes can be seen as an outcome of specific interpretative strategies which, in turn, constituted a response to several institutional challenges facing the nineteenth-century Penitentiary.

ONE MUST BEGIN with Dickens. A chapter by Christopher Hibbert in Charles Dickens, 1812–1870: centenary volume, edited by E. W. F. Tomlin, and The London of Charles Dickens, published by London Transport with aid from the Dickens Fellowship, make a similar study here superfluous; both are illustrated, the latter giving instructions for reaching surviving Dickensian buildings. Neither warns the reader of Dickens's conscious and unconscious imaginative distortion, considered in Humphrey House's The Dickens World. Dickens himself imagined Captain Cuttle hiding in Switzerland and Paul Dombey's wild waves saying ‘Paris’; ‘the association between the writing and the place of writing is so curiously strong in my mind.’ Author and character may be in two places at once. ‘I could not listen at my fireside, for five minutes to the outer noises, but it was borne into my ears that I was dead.’ (Our Mutual Friend)

CHARLES DICKENS'S immense popularity when his novels first appeared in weekly and monthly parts, and his continuing popularity today is due, above all, to his skill in creating memorable characters whose fortunes the reader compulsively follows. His characters show their creator's remarkable powers of observation, particularly in small details, so that the reader constantly stops to think, ‘How true to life!’ or ‘How like old so‐and‐so!’ Many of them were based on real people—his father (Mr Micawber), his mother (Mrs Nickleby), himself (David Copperfield), but they are so transmuted that the originals did not recognize themselves. In Bleak House he had to modify his sketch of Harold Skimpole, who was too recognizably Leigh Hunt.

This paper examines a user categorisation of documents related to a particular literary work. Fifty study participants completed an unconstrained sorting task of documents related to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas carol. After they had finished the sorting task, participants wrote descriptions of the attributes they used to create each group. Content analysis of these descriptions revealed categories of attributes used for grouping. Participants used physical format, audience, content description, pictorial elements, usage, and language most frequently for grouping. Many of the attributes participants used for grouping already exist in bibliographic records and may be used to cluster records related to works automatically in online catalogue displays. The attributes used by people in classifying or grouping documents related to a work may be used to guide the design of summary online catalogue work displays.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Dickens et al. model of bank holding company dividend policy. They identified five explanatory factors in a sample of bank holding companies (BHCs). Banking companies typically pay larger dividends and more often than industrial firms. Investors often look at the dividends as being important return variables.

In this study, a sample of 99 firms with 2006 data from governmental reports and Yahoo is used in regression equations to test the relationship of the five identified variables with dividend yields. The analysis is extended to investigate non‐linearities between dividend yield and insider ownership.

The paper finds that the original model is robust, but not all variables keep their significance. Insider holdings have a non‐linear relationship with dividend yields.

The significant factors affecting bank dividend policy help dividend seeking investors find BHCs that return higher dividend yields.

This paper reveals a non‐linear link between insider holdings and dividend yields among BHCs.