I am very much aware that it is an act of extreme rashness to attempt to write an elementary book about structures. Indeed it is only when the subject is stripped of its mathematics that one begins to realize how difficult it is to pin down and describe those structural concepts which are often called' elementary'; by which I suppose we mean 'basic' or 'fundamental'. Some of the omis- sions and oversimplifications are intentional but no doubt some of them are due to my own brute ignorance and lack of under- standing of the subject. Although this volume is more or less a sequel to The New...

This book explores three crucial stages in Dickens' on-going voyage of discovery into what has been called the 'hidden springs' of his fiction; arguing that in three of Dickens best known novels, we witness Dickens responding to some identifiable force represented as coming from underneath the ground plan of the book in question.