I'd always wanted to read him and never doubted Dickens was great, but I had trouble with those really good little girls. His Bleak House I previously tried to read but couldn't. There's no doubting, though, what a really wonderful writer he was. I really didn't want to go to English writers. It was my wife who had the great idea of reading the accounts of American visitors because it would be fresh.
Visitors see things that locals never see.
What one has to do, particularly as an Australian and certainly as someone who's not a Londoner, is be able to take possession of that city and command it. English readers, Londoners especially, you've got to convince them that you have a right to hold their city. You earned that right. But it must have been a prodigious amount of work. It was continual and neurotic.