ABSTRACT
Perhaps surprisingly the impact of Dickens’s writing on the sense of personal relationship felt by many readers is not dependent on the possibility of his presence. The afterlife of the Dickensian text is deeply felt in later books such as Robert Allbut’s Rambles in Dickens Land, rst published in 1886 and updated in 1899, in which he moves the novelist’s imagined scenes into the material world through the responsive mind of the reader, ‘It is one of the magic legacies left by the great romancers, that the scenes and characters which they described should possess for most of us an air of reality, so convincing as sometimes to put staid history to the blush. The novelist’s ideals become actual to the popular mind’ (ix introduction. Emphasis added), in a formulation according to which readers themselves assume the novelistic faculty, ‘He that found out this rare world has made it fully ours. Let us visit our inheritance, or revisit it, if that be the better word. Let us make real the scenes we have read of and dreamt of – peopling them with the folk of Dickens, so that familiar faces shall look upon us from familiar windows, familiar voices greet us as we pass’ (xxi-xxii introduction).
