Years ago now, when, like Magwitch, I arrived back in England from Australia, I was plunged into the experience of teaching Dickens at University College, Oxford. Unlike the returned transportee, I didn't come to serious harm beneath the grinding wheels of the paddle steamer, although it was something of a close call. Nor did I find myself confined in prison. Far from it, in fact, as the experience of encountering the novels afresh (I had not taught them in Australia) was to prove one of those painful pleasures that proliferate in Dickens. Painful because, like Matthew Pocket, I had become a tutorial ‘grinder’. Trying to teach various combinations of the novels to individual students over the course of a single week could culminate in a final hazy Friday afternoon tutorial, where every character seemed to have crowded together in one huge canvas. Mrs Gamp and Mr Micawber, to name but two, may have turned up in more than one novel – sometimes, I'm afraid, together. The pleasure, of course, was in the sheer imaginative richness of the writing, and listening to undergraduates respond to it with such obvious enthusiasm. This book is conceived of as an ‘introduction’ to this wonderful diversity rather than a guide that painstakingly offers a commentary on each novel. Guides of that kind are numerous, and many of them are excellent, but I've attempted a more inductive approach by using five topics to open up the richness of the Dickens world, including the question of adaptation, something that started while Dickens was alive and to which Dickens himself contributed via public performances of his work.