The sentimental bond between Dickens and his implied (and actual) readership provides the real emotional heart of each of the great novels. It involves, as I shall argue in this chapter, several key aspects of the nineteenth-century sentimentalist tradition, including its evolution from eighteenth-century moralising to individual emotional sympathy, and its confusion between the theatrical and public on the one hand and the Romantic and private on the other. The unique closeness of Dickens and his readers is so generally accepted (even by critics who object to it) that I feel obliged to include Virginia Woolf 's perverse comment to prove my point through the blatant inappropriateness of hers:

Robert Garis provides one example of a much more common response:

Benjamin Jowett, who delivered the sermon at Dickens's funeral service, expressed the same sense of attachment on behalf of the first generation of Dickens's readers: