The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist

"Two or three illustrative quotes become four, five, six, seven… Please, sir, I want some less ..."

"'Another kind of novelist might tell you Merdle's thoughts,' Mullan observes, 'or at least the symptoms of his anxieties.' Dickens, by contrast, insists on seeing him 'only from the outside', by means of fantastic analogy."

"In discrete chapters, the author highlights more than a dozen characteristics that set Dickens apart from other writers ..."

"Astute observations abound ..."

"The Artful Dickens is both an exposure of the trickster's methods and a celebration of close reading."

"The chapter on naming is one of the book's most fascinating ..."

"Rather than advance a consistent argument about Dickens's artistry, Mullan responds to the novelist's multifariousness with an appealing miscellany of his own ..."

"His method in each chapter is to define a specific feature and produce examples."