"He did not always manage to make his characters men, but he always managed, at the least, to make them gods."

Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest. He did not always manage to make his characters men, but he always managed, at the least, to make them gods. They are creatures like Punch or Father Christmas. They live statically, in a perpetual summer of being themselves. It was not the aim of Dickens to show the effect of time and circumstance upon a character; it was not even his aim to show the effect of a character on time and circumstance...it was his aim to show character hung in a kind of happy void, in a world apart from time

-Charles Dickens (1906)