The hope Dickens expressed to Robert Lytton in 1867 provides a suitable aspiration for an introduction such as this one. Few people come to the novels without already knowing something of them or about Dickens, ‘Please, sir, can I have some more’ being the most common baseline of knowledge. Hopefully reading this introduction will induce even greater appetite and possibly even greediness for more. Dickens himself, I've been arguing, had an imagination of seemingly endless proliferation, of the sort that didn't even rest easy with the completion of his own finished works, as witnessed by his refashioning of them as texts for performance in the public readings. Just as those who listened to Dickens's performances of his characters often struggled to match his embodiment of them to what they had imagined in reading for themselves (or being read to by others), so most first-time readers of the novels have already had the novels mediated through film or television versions, not to mention the endless recycling of highlights through other media, from London pub signs through to all kinds of ad campaigns, a process that had already begun while Dickens was still alive.