Charles Dickens: His Life and Work

To say that this is Dickens bovrilised and peptonised—it is, as it were, all the biographies and Dickensiana subjected to some Chicagoan literary sausage-machine—is not to belittle Professor Leacock. The professor as usual is scarifying on schools and colleges. He is crisp, concise, dramatic. The book is a miracle of compression. It's the quantity plus quality of Dickens’s work which makes his biographer gasp, and its universal appeal. His books have been read for their own sake from first to last. In the sheer comprehensiveness of his work “no writer has ever equalled or approached it. None ever will.