Excerpt from Charles Dickens: An Appreciation of His Books and a Guide to Their ReadingAlways an ardent spectator of life, always an amused and amusing observer at that stage on which we are all players, Dickens has bequeathed us novels of simple, homely life rather than of imagery and make-believe. His characters are so real that we can almost reach out and touch them. That is why Dickens is so universally popular, in his characters we discover ourselves, and the people whose lives we elbow from day to day.It is inevitable, to know Dickens is to love him. He is unique. He belongs to no special age, but to all time. He belongs to no special race, but to all people. In his own day, critics said of him, He looks into his heart and writes.That heart has long since been stilled, but the soul of the man still ¿ashes through his stories. That is one of the reasons why the dust of Charles Dickens will mingle forever with the dust of immortals in West minster Abbey.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.