'The first condition of an author's popularity, the prime means to make people like him, is the love with which he treats his characters. This is why Dickens's characters are the friends of all mankind; they are the bond of union between Man in America and Man in Petersburg.' If we substitute 'Leningrad' for 'Petersburg', these words from Tolstoy's notebooks seem true today. Dickens's books still jostle the Bible and Das Kapital as world best-sellers. It was Chesterton who called him 'a mythologist rather than a novelist'; certainly, the characters and situations which he created have achieved such general currency wherever novels are read that they have soften seemed less the products of English literary culture than of a transmuted popular consciousness, like the heroes of Greek epics. Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations, is one of the many Dickens characters - Pickwick, Quilp, Fagin, Little Nell, Pecksniff - who are much part of the permanent furniture of the private and public rooms of the Western mind as Ulysses and Sinbad.
When Dickens's imagination went to work on the Victorian society which he dominated and detested, it produced a picture which was certainly caricatured and unfair in particulars, but which in general now seems not only to reflect his own times accurately but also to be a disturbingly close likeness of our own. His inspired comic creations and his daemonic villains have often been dismissed as mere gargoyles and monsters, crudely enjoyable though unreal. But, as Lionel Trilling says, 'We who have seen Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels put on the stage of history, and Picksniffery institutionalised in the Kremlin, are in no position to suppose that Dickens ever exaggerated in the least the extravagance of madness, absurdity and malevolence in the world – or, conversely, when we consider the resistance to those qualities, the goodness.'
