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I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.

Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.

Dickens writes such brilliant characters and stories, and his themes and social commentary are still so relevant. I think that's why he's still so loved today.

I love Dickens because it makes me chuckle to myself so. He has taken me to another world and out of so many earthly miseries.

The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.

I didn't want to be stuck in Dickens period dramas because then I would never know if I was any good.

The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters.

I'm not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was.

I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks - who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.

The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.