Throughout his work, Charles Dickens focused upon the definition, composition, and democratizing of the process of writing history. In Dickens and New Historicism, William J. Palmer takes as his point of departure the New Historicist critical theories articulated by Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra and others, and offers a critical analysis of Dickens's complete body of work.

Palmer reveals that not only did Dickens give voice to the marginalized participants in the history of the eighteenth century and of his own contemporary Victorian age, but evolved a philosophy of history composed from the perspective of those marginalized voices.