From The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens:

The greatest of all Dickens critics, G.K. Chesterton, emerged just after the turn of the century, in a number of writings, most notably in Charles Dickens (1906) and introductions to the Everyman edition of the novels, collected as Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911). Responsive to the humour, humanity, and fecundity of Dickens, Chesterton's exhilarating (and sometimes maddening) reliance on paradox sheds light on innumerable complexities of Dicken's art. Celebrating his characters as 'timeless gods' who inhabit not novels but a 'mythology', Chesterton overturns the narrow strictures of realism by insisting that Dicken's art makes things 'seem more actual than things really are'.