ABSTRACT

In February 1912, The Bookman marked the centenary of Charles Dickens’s birth with a symposium gathering twenty-six sets of responses to a series of questions about Dickens’s twentieth-century standing.1 The survey took in “a selection of representative authors, artists, and men and women eminent in English public life.” After soliciting any “personal recollections” of Dickens which they might be in a position to share, it asked them to say “whether their life or work owed anything to his influence,” state “their personal opinion of the value of his novels,” and specify “which they would rank as the greatest of his books.”2