"WHO READS CHARLES DICKENS? Everybody, sooner or later—and they keep on doing so. And sooner or later they long to meet the man to whom they owe such friends as Dick Swiveller, or Sairey Gamp, or Sam Weller, or somebody else of whose society they never tire. There are many books by which they can meet him, from Forster to Chesterton; the excuse for one more is that each generation discovers Dickens for itself, and there are, incredibly, young Americans who have not yet discovered Dickens.

"What is in the this book is neither older nor newer than Charles Dickens himself. It draws most freely upon his own revealing letters. It depends otherwise upon people who saw him, listened to him, laughed with him, and wrote down how he looked and acted and spoke."

"In the summer of 1939 I was resting in the garden of the Sir John Falstaff, looking across to the solid redbrick mansion that was the home of Dickens' dreams, and wondering why Gad's Hill Place, where Dickens himself had lived, should seem so quiet and deserted, when at the Bull Inn at Rochester you never go up the stairway without expecting to meet one of the Pickwickians coming down.

His people seemed so much more alive than he...

"And then I saw something strange and wonderful. On the smooth green lawn at my feet something was lightly moving, changing from one exquisite shape into another so swiftly the eye could scarcely follow. It had no substance; it was more alive than anything else in the garden; it was a dancing shadow. Looking up, I saw that the wind, blowing strong in the sun, was whipping and driving a flimsy, torn pennant. The wind and sun were forcing it to create beauty.

"Who was Charles Dickens? He was a banner in the sun, the wind was his genius, and his novels the dancing shadows. The ruthless genius used him, drove him, tore him, killed him, and left him. But it also left his novels, and they are all that matter."

From the dust jacket