This comes close to joining the top ranks--Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend--except for some serious problems in characterization: most notably the focus on the angelic maudlin central figure, who is reminiscent of Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop (of whom Oscar Wilde wrote that anyone who cries reading the description of her death must have a heart of stone). Secondly, for the attempt to make us feel sorry at the end for Mrs. Clennam, the puritanical harpy whose self-righteous moralizing destroys the lives of half of the characters in the book. I mean, I realize Dickens bought into the basic tenets of Victorian sexual morality, but be serious, okay? In Anthony Trollope novels, there is always a character like this, and she is always the irredeemable arch-villainess, which is as it should be. That aside, the sequences in the debtor's prison are among Dickens's very very best and even prefigure Kafka in their allegorical dreamlike eeriness.