ABSTRACT
Trezise and asked me if I would be willing to do “something about Dickens criticism in France since 1970,” I immediately responded positively to his of fer. I felt I had some experience in this kind of work, having contributed an essay, “La critique dickensienne: apergu historique et perspectives nouvelles,” for the “Dossier Dickens” in the French journal Romantisme at Jean Gattegno’s request in 1981, and having further trained myself a few years later when I wrote the last chapter of my monograph on Great Expectations (1988) for the Unwin Critical Library which, following the pattern of all the books in that series, was a critical survey covering all the years from the publication of Dickens’s novel up to 1985. The one thing that did not occur to me at the time was that both my essay and my book chapter dealt with international criticism of Dickens and mainly works written in English.
