Frederick Busch has called his novel about Dickens The Mutual Friend. An alternative title might have been Great Expectorations. (p. 61)

The Dickens reassembled in [The Mutual Friend] pulsates with energy, creative and destructive: fires break out around him as he uses up himself and others in a consuming commitment to his work. But if the figure is vibrant, it is also familiar. There is nothing new in this reconstruction of the novelist and much is romantically naive. A hackneyed stress falls on the usual polarities: the life-lover who frequented morgues and corpses; the bard of the hearth who broke up his home; the prosperous law-abider drawn compulsively towards the derelict and criminal.

Contrasts fascinate Mr. Busch. A few miles or a few years, he keeps emphasising, could make an immeasurable difference to the worlds in which people lived in 19th-century England. Dickens, seen as exploiting this, visits the...