 Here's what Dickens means to me. My first encounter was the 1930s movie of David Copperfield with Freddie Bartholomew. I identified with David's difficulties because my parents were divorcing. True, there was no blacking factory, but nor was there an Aunt Betsy Trotwood. Next, at Cambridge in the 1940s, I was mesmerized by F.R. Leavis into loving George Elliot and ignoring Dickens. In the 1950s, I wrote a Princeton PhD on George Elliot and she is still my candidate in any contest for top Victorian novelist. Since the 1950s, I've belonged to all the George Elliot societies and subscribed to all the newsletters and to none of the Dickens equivalents. However, through my work on the Victorian press and the Victorian city, I've developed a profound admiration for Dickens's editorial achievement and his philanthropic work with Angela Burdett Coates. And recently, my eyes have been happily opened by rereading him starting with Picnic. But, pickwick, not picnic. I hope I'll reach Edwin Drude well before my 85th birthday and I'm discovering previously unread essays and short stories. So here's where I stand today. Dickens and George Elliot are both geniuses of the European 19th century novel. And only Balzac and Tolstoy, maybe Flaubert and Dostoevsky, are on a par with them. But George Elliot was also an intellectual genius and that shows in the depth and sustained power of her fiction. Of course, Dickens was a great entertainer and a marvelous popularizer with a powerful social conscience. George Elliot also had a powerful social conscience, but she was no popularizer and the only people she entertained were the educated readers she chose to write for. My most argumentative way of putting it is that Dickens had breadth while George Elliot was comparatively narrow and George Elliot had depth while Dickens was comparatively shallow. George Elliot's legacy is for me more capacious and more satisfying. As is the case with certain philosophers and saints, the better I know her and her work, the better I become. In short, George Elliot wears the laurel crown and Dickens proximate access it. To be judged by one old man to be worthy only of the second prize in an online European Olympic Games, after all, that isn't bad. Would the today's novelists could compete for fame and glory rather than mere runners and jumpers?