Why Dickens

"People sometimes ask 'Why Dickens?," which I always take to be a gentle rebuke. I point to the one book that supplied me with a friend at a time when it was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own, even when that skin is white and belongs to a boy alive in Dickens' England. Now if that isn't an act of magic I don't know what is." From Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip