This book took me forever to read, even though most of the letters in it were fairly short. In my opinion much of the correspondence was boring, made more difficult by the fact that you only get one side of the conversation. Some of the letters were pointless – simply replying to an invitation witho

Always a joy to spend time with Dickens. In the letters you feel as if he's a friend, a bumptious, insecure, energetic, funny, force-of-nature friend. It's such a privilege to be able to spend time in his company.

While I love reading Dickens long form fiction, this book is mostly for Dickens nerds who want to know more personal details. He wrote letters as much as he wrote fiction, and though there are bits of fiction, etc, tossed about in letters, it was hard to slog through so many. I found the letters to

Review Title: The Sadness of The Inimitible

Jimmy Buffett wrote a song about finding "the heart of my story with the point of my pen." In this collection of 450 letters from the prolific pen of Dickens (the full multi-volume set of his letters collects over 14,000, after Dickens himself destroyed man