For fans old and new, this is a fascinating tour through Charles Dickens’s novels in the hands of a master critic and interpreter of his work. Oliver Twist … Great Expectations … David Copperfield – all contain riotous fictional worlds that still live and breathe for readers today. But how much do we really know about the dazzling imagination that brought this all into being? To celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Dickens in 2012, Victorian literature expert John Sutherland has created a gloriously wide-ranging alphabetical companion to Dickens’s novels, excavating the hidden links between his characters, themes, and preoccupations, and the minutiae of his endlessly inventive wordplay. Covering Baby Farming, Bastards, Cannibalism, Christmas, Darwin, Fog, Gruel, London, Micawberomics, Murder, Pubs, Punishment, Smells, Spontaneous Combustion and Zoo Horrors to name but a few, Sutherland gives us a uniquely personal guide to the greatest novelist England has ever produced.