Catalogue of an exhibition of the works of Charles Dickens

Yet a specific setting is not disclosed within the novel itself, and the world of this text looks much the way Margaret Thatcher's Britain would probably look to Jane Austen: a place of increasing material comforts but decreasing emotional contact: "Eden Grove is a friendly place. My neighbors and I give dinner parties… We discuss things, rather than ideas; we exchange information, not theories… It is a good life. [My husband] tells me so. He comes home less often, so does not say so as often as he did." A. S. Byatt's Possession stresses a continuum of English settings (and literary achievement) extending from the past into the present. Set partly in the nineteenth century, Byatt's novel is, among other things-as Diane Johnson recognized in the New York Review of Books-"an affirmation of the Victorian novel." Anita Brookner, the only child of Jewish emigrants from Poland, was seven when her sensitive father guided her through the works of Dickens, hoping that this quintessentially English writer would help his daughter to master the strange new culture into which the family had been transplanted ...»