Head in an Iron Safe: Dickens’s Tricks
David Trotter, 17 December 2020
What most distinguishes Dickens’s novels from those by almost any other writer, and from life, is that hardly anything in them ever recedes entirely into the background. Dickens fought long and hard against the human tendency to focus exclusively on what is of immediate pressing concern in any given situation. His often anodyne protagonists have to compete for our attention with the...