'At age sixteen, Neville Cardus (whose parents were launderers in turn of the century Manchester) read in the Athenaeum that no one was reading Dickens anymore: he trudged from one public library to another, only to be told that every copy of his novels had been loaned out. His discovery of Dickens in shilling Harmsworth editions did more than erase the boundary between fiction and life: "It was scarcely a case of reading at all; it was almost an experience of a world more alive and dimensional than this world".