Rosemarie Bodenheimer has been trying to get her head around Dickens since her undergraduate days. She spent her working life as Professor of English at Boston College, specializing in Victorian and modern fiction. In The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (1994) and Knowing Dickens (2007), she fashioned a form of biographical criticism that juxtaposes a writer's letters with published works, as mutually illuminating forms of writing. After retirement, she published in various areas, most recently Samuel Beckett in the OUP series My Reading (2022).Philip Davis was, until his retirement, Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) at the University of Liverpool, with strong interests in reading and inner being, with particular relation to emotion, memory, auto/biography, and fictional realism. His work on Victorian writing includes Memory and Writing, The Victorians volume in the Oxford English Literary History series, Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, and The Transferred Life of George Eliot. He is an editor of two OUP series: The Literary Agenda and My Reading.

In Dialogue with Dickens is an exhilarating book. It shows how good readers read, and the way they make literature part of their lives. If one wanted a book to persuade a young person that academic criticism can be inspiring, this work by two veterans would be a good choice.

• Preface Introduction 1: Mr Dombey and Mr Dickens 2: Recalled to Life 3: His Favourite Child - David Copperfield 4: After Copperfield 5: 'The Wrong Side of the Pattern' - Little Dorrit, Book 1 6: Little Dorrit between Books 7: Through the Looking-Glass - Little Dorrit, Book 2 8: 'Like a Broken Glass' - Bleak House Part 1: Begin Part 2: Between Part 3: End Afterword

Rosemarie Bodenheimer has been trying to get her head around Dickens since her undergraduate days. She spent her working life as Professor of English at Boston College, specializing in Victorian and modern fiction. In The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (1994) and Knowing Dickens (2007), she fashioned a form of biographical criticism that juxtaposes a writer's letters with published works, as mutually illuminating forms of writing. After retirement, she published in various areas, most recently Samuel Beckett in the OUP series My Reading (2022).Philip Davis was, until his retirement, Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) at the University of Liverpool, with strong interests in reading and inner being, with particular relation to emotion, memory, auto/biography, and fictional realism. His work on Victorian writing includes Memory and Writing, The Victorians volume in the Oxford English Literary History series, Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, and The Transferred Life of George Eliot. He is an editor of two OUP series: The Literary Agenda and My Reading.

In Dialogue with Dickens is an exhilarating book. It shows how good readers read, and the way they make literature part of their lives. If one wanted a book to persuade a young person that academic criticism can be inspiring, this work by two veterans would be a good choice.

• Preface Introduction 1: Mr Dombey and Mr Dickens 2: Recalled to Life 3: His Favourite Child - David Copperfield 4: After Copperfield 5: 'The Wrong Side of the Pattern' - Little Dorrit, Book 1 6: Little Dorrit between Books 7: Through the Looking-Glass - Little Dorrit, Book 2 8: 'Like a Broken Glass' - Bleak House Part 1: Begin Part 2: Between Part 3: End Afterword