Bernard Schilling's book is the culmination of a lifetime's love of the works of Dickens. He has read the novels over and over again, until he has virtually memorized their themes and images.As a result, this final tribute creates the effect of having been written spontaneously out of a huge store of Dickensian memories. The main thrust of the book lies in the interpretation of Great Expectations, but around the images and characters of this novel cluster echoes drawn from the whole range of Dickens's writings.

What is most impressive is the skill with which the work is organized. Readers of the first part, “Of Things Eternal,”may at first wonder what all these myriad examples of Darkness, the River, the tolling Bell, and “the wind and rain” have to do with the novel that stands first in the present book's title, for only a few references to Great Expectations are given. But none are really needed: gradually we understand where we are headed. The same is true for the second part of the book, “The Human Scene,” which extends the exploration of themes and images through London, “a baffling complexity,” a “labyrinth,” on to the theme of Money, the persistent image of the prison, the Country, the Journey, and the dark houses in many novels. Especially notable is the grim facade in Dombey and Son, which bears out the meaning of all these houses: “the appearance of a house suggests its role or influence in a given novel,as we meet with habitations sympathetic, reassuring, peaceful, inviting,or sinister, grimly brooding, menacing, corrupt or rotting with decay.” And finally, climatically, we come to the dominant image of the staircase, which runs from beginning to end in Dickens's novels, marking crucial moments in the action, as when Pip first ascends the staircase to meet Miss Havisham, on to the moment when he hears the footstep of Magwitch ascending to him.

Meanwhile, quietly, unobtrusively, these themes and images are frequently linked together in scattered passages, as the book's first part concludes with a powerful quotation from Dombey and Son, where rain, wind, darkness and the tolling bell are all brought together.