I believe this book is certainly destined to become one of the great, indispensable classics of Dickens criticism. - Michael Slater (The Dickensian) The chapters of this brilliant study of Charles Dickens are 'built around certain recurrent clusters of thought and feeling in Dickens's writing, in order to illuminate some of the ways of knowing that drove his creative life.'. Bodenheimer is especially keen on describing the ways in which Dickens plumbed his own rich fantasy life and parceled it out among imagined characters. - Barbara Fisher (Boston Sunday Globe) Writing at the intersections of public and private, and of biography and criticism, Rosemarie Bodenheimer's beautifully written study of Charles Dickens focuses intently on a body of writing that has too often been accused of lacking interiority and psychological depth. Carefully tracing the workings of Dickens's conscious and unconscious mind in his letters, journalism and fiction, Bodenheimer argues that the writer was engaged in a lifelong process of self-observation as keen as the observations that he brought to bear on others, and that he projected on to his fictional characters 'an inward way of being that knew itself by mirroring its aspects on external screens.'. - Sally Ledger (Times Higher Education Supplement)a lifelong process of self-observation as keen as the observations that he brought to bear on others, and that he projected on to his fictional characters 'an inward way of being that knew itself by mirroring its aspects on external screens.

'.- Sally Ledger (Times Higher Education Supplement)a lifelong process of self-observation as keen as the observations that he brought to bear on others, and that he projected on to his fictional characters 'an inward way of being that knew itself by mirroring its aspects on external screens.'.- Sally Ledger (Times Higher Education Supplement)a lifelong process of self-observation as keen as the observations that he brought to bear on others, and that he projected on to his fictional characters 'an inward way of being that knew itself by mirroring its aspects on external screens.'.- Sally Ledger (Times Higher Education Supplement).