"George Orwell once said of Dickens' work: "It is not so much a series of books, it is more like a world." In this book, J. Hillis Miller attempts to identify this "world," to show how a single view of life pervades every novel that Dickens wrote, and to trace the development of this view throughout the chronological span of Dickens' career. There are full critical analyses of six of the novels-Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend-and shorter discussions of many of the others. Each novel has been viewed as the transformation of the real world of Dickens' experience into an imaginary world with certain special qualities of its own." -- Amazon.com