While Charles Dickens is best known and celebrated for his prolific journalistic output and novelistic creations, he also devoted some of his creative energies to verse.

At turns sentimental, melancholy, playful, humorous and satirical, and ranging considerably in tone and format – from songs to narrative prologues for novels and squibs for newspapers – the poems in this collection highlight Dickens’s gift for language and his unfailing power to touch.