Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens

Chesterton wrote these pieces as prefaces for J. M. Dent’s cheap Everyman’s Library edition of Dickens, one for each volume, and in 1911 Dent collected them. The book opens with a new prologue and then works through twenty-three essays, from Sketches by Boz to the unfinished Edwin Drood, taking in the Christmas books, A Child’s History of England and the Italian and American travel writing. The prologue picks up a worry current since the 1880s, that Dickens was fading from the modern world, and answers that the modern world is what faded. To readers who had filed him away as a caricaturist, Chesterton replies that the caricatures are the part carved in stone, and that no writer of his rank made happiness so squarely his subject. Fine company for a Dickens reread.