This essay offers a new reading of Charles Dickens's prefaces, a surprisingly neglected area in Dickens scholarship. It argues that the prefaces offer a particularly rich site for reexamining the role of the modern author as both literary creator and public conscience. The peculiar structure of address of a Dickens preface makes visible the cultural and linguistic forces involved in the institution of literature and of the author as its primary agent and thus serves to instantiate the acts literature performs in the world.