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Dickens's gift is how spontaneously he can render a situation both sympathetic and hilarious - and charged with his fierce indignation, with what Johnson calls his "furious exposure of social evils." Yet Dickens's greatest risk-taking, as a writer, has little to do with his social morality. What he is most unafraid of is sentimentality - of anger, of passion, of emotionally and psychologically revealing himself; he is not self-protective; he is never careful. In the present, post-modernist praise of the craft of writing - of the subtle, of the exquisite - we may have refined the very heart out of the novel. Dickens would have had more fun with today's literary elitists and minimalists than he had with Mr Pumblechook and Mrs Jellyby. He was the king of the novel in that century which produced models of the form.
-- John Irving, essay "The King of the Novel" (1986), from the collection Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1993).
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