Why Charles Dickens speaks to us now Today there is no escaping Charles Dickens. Not that there has ever been much chance of that before. He has a deep, peculiar hold upon us. His contemporaries (Thackeray, Trollope, Meredith) shiver in Dickens's vast shadow, denied the T-shirts and tea-towels showered on the man who wrote Oliver Twist. Dickens's books are forever metamorphosing into plays, films, musicals; his characters have permeated the collective imagination. His reputation as a craftsman, as opposed to a hack, has slowly expanded, as critics have begun to appreciate the fictional ground he broke. His influence is paramount. Mervyn Peake wouldn't exist without him, nor Iris Murdoch. Any novel today that has an ensemble cast and concerns itself with social matters is labelled "Dickensian." There are many reasons for this. He, more than any other author, stands firmly entrenched in the lineage of English writing. He stretches back into the storehouse of the canon, drawing on the Bible and Bunyan for his morals and absolutes, reaching into Shakespeare for those bumptious personages like Pecksniff and Micawber. He is part of the genetic coding of the way that we think about books. His hypnotic plots are beautifully conceived variants on two of the deepest themes that touch us: mystery and revelation. The entropic weirdness of Bleak House; the thrilling detection of Great Expectations; even the comical niceties of The Pickwick Papers have a sense of urgency to them. His themes are copious, vivid, capable of enormous sweeps and tender delicacies: law, justice, the sense of a diseased society - these are things that never leave us. The range of his characters is huge: if you feel sick at the sentimentality of Jo the crossing sweeper's death, or indeed at the "comedy" of Sam Weller in Pickwick, you can't help but marvel at the austerity of Miss Havisham or the cruelty of Ebeneezer Scrooge. We feel that we know him, too. The Victorian age is the first recognisably modern one, and Dickens captures fully that sense of rushing expansion into the unknown. But what he also provides - and perhaps this is the most important reason for his continuing endurance - is, like children's books, a resolution. While we may not know what will happen, while the world teeters on the edge of wars and revolutions, Dickens gives us a sense of wholeness that we lack. He doesn't merely mirror life, he improves it. We sit entranced at his feet, safe in his stories; and when we come out, we have tools to help us guard against the dark.