During Charles Dickens's lifetime, education publications such as "The Union Sixth Reader" already shared methods for teaching his works. "The Union Sixth Reader" gives evidence to educational concerns surrounding the best uses of language, as though Dickens's turns of phrase could empower students. Today, educators may not teach Dickensian prose as superior. However, they do seek to empower students through verbal and cultural literacy to connect them with influential stories of the past and present. This paper demonstrates how teaching a little-known Dickens detective story, "Hunted Down," in its original serialized context, and then performing a dramatic reading of theirs. Students recognize his simultaneous urge to secure his own cultural status in America while advocating for the marginalized. By earning course credit and service learning credit as readers, editors, and marketers, class members better understood Dickens's logic that they can lift themselves by lifting others.