On the centenary in 1970 of Dickens's death, his image appeared on the postage stamps of thirteen British Commonwealth countries. For over a decade (1992–2003), Dickens was the face of the British ten-pound note and the image of a cricket match at Dingley Dell from The Pickwick Papers formed its background. As I write this Introduction in 2011 on the eve of the bicentenary of Dickens's birth, new Dickens adaptations, biographies, press stories, events, conferences and exhibitions are already announcing themselves all over the world. Dickens's continued cultural prominence and the ‘brand recognition’ achieved by his image and images seem to suggest that his vision has a certain consonance in the post-Victorian world. But how modern was Dickens? This question gives rise to no simple answer but to a myriad of paradoxes and contradictions. To the general public, Dickens has come to represent all that is not modern; he has become synonymous with a Victorian age defined in opposition to the present. It is notable that though Dickens is the most adapted author of all time for the screen, whereas it is a familiar experience to view ‘modern’ Shakespeare adaptations, there are relatively few Dickens adaptations that eschew costume for contemporary dress and settings; significantly, those that do so are often set and directed abroad. The viewing public likes to fix Dickens in a particular vision of a Victorian period which it associates with ‘the past’ as well as with a distinctive brand of Englishness or Britishness.

Demography plays a central role in ecology, and accurate estimation of demographic parameters is essential to testing basic theories of life-history evolution, population regulation, and species coexistence, as well as applying ecological theory to a broad range of practical issues including species conservation, predicting shifts in species distribution due to climate change, and understanding the emergence and spread of new diseases. Our goals in this chapter are twofold: first, to demonstrate a problem with estimating demographic parameters that stems from ignoring dispersal, and second, to propose a solution to this problem. We illustrate the problem with a simulation model that shows how ignoring dispersal may lead to the misclassification of sources and sinks; we attempt to solve the problem by using generalized linear models to differentiate population change due to fecundity from population change due to dispersal, thereby helping to improve source and sink classification. We believe that the particular example discussed is only one of a number of parameter-estimation problems limiting our ability to test and apply ecological theories in field systems and that an approach to parameter estimation similar to that used here may be broadly useful in narrowing the gap between ecological theory and field testing of that theory.

For a century, melodrama was virtually ignored by literary criticism. What makes this silence particularly strange is that melodrama was the most popular kind of theatrical entertainment for much of the nineteenth century, and ‘more people went to the theatre during the nineteenth century than at any time in history’. Dickens was one of those people; indeed, he watched, wrote and acted in stage melodramas. In his journalism, popular drama was a recurrent concern and formed the centrepiece of his journalistic articulation of his social and cultural vision. His seminal two-part essay, ‘The Amusements of the People’, opens with the assertion that ‘nothing will ever root out from among the common people an innate love they have for dramatic entertainment’. Dickens sees popular drama as enabling cultural inclusion, and melodrama in particular as offering a common language through which all strata of society can communicate. As Dickens explains in the same essay, melodrama, like ‘the Italian Opera’, speaks through ‘conventional passion’: ‘So do extremes meet’, Dickens writes, ‘and so there is some hopeful congeniality between what will excite mr whelks, and what will rouse a Duchess’. In his novels, Dickens appropriates melodramatic aesthetics to facilitate cultural inclusivity.

Melodrama evolved with an uneducated audience in mind, thus offering Dickens an ideal aesthetic template through which to reach an audience often excluded from serious literature. The word itself, literally meaning ‘music-drama’ or ‘song-drama’, derives from Greek, but reached Britain by way of French.

In the years since Dickens first found fame as an author, his image has been used in many contexts, most suggestively as the face, for over a decade, of the Bank of England's ₤10 note. Dickens's image, like that of Charles Darwin which replaced his on the ₤10 note, was no doubt chosen to convey something of Britain's ‘greatness’, of a national heritage imparting solidity to the flimsiness of paper money. On the Dickens ₤10 note, his image is superimposed on the nostalgic, ‘inimitably English’ scene from The Pickwick Papers (1836–7): the Dingley Dell cricket match. The Dickens ₤10 note captures much about the way in which Dickens's image has been used posthumously by the heritage industry: the note works to promote an association between Dickens and an idea of Englishness that combines cosy communality with reminders of the ‘greatness’ of Britain's past.

The phrase ‘the heritage industry’ was coined by Robert Hewison in his work of that name, and is widely used to refer to the heritage sector in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, the idea of the Victorians as self-conscious engineers and pioneers of a political and commercial sense of national and international ‘heritage’ is widely accepted. John Gardiner has written in engaging terms about the ways in which the Victorians, notably Queen Victoria, ‘anticipated twentieth-century observers in their attitude to heritage’; his description of Victoria's servants as going through a ‘dress rehearsal for the “heritage industry” of today’ is more widely applicable to the role of Victorians in the evolution of the heritage industry.