The world seems to split itself into two around Charles Dickens. There are those who have, and those who haven't. Read him, I mean. Views are strongly expressed on both sides of the gulf. For those who haven't – even otherwise very literate people – it seems self-evident that trawling through these great Victorian doorstops is a ridiculous idea, a stupendous waste of time. If you want realism (they say), turn to Balzac, not this mincingly, effortfully comic world of semi-racist grotesques, angelic virgins and moustache-twiddling villains. For those who have, there's a large and happy club of believers in existence whose members can share jokes about Mrs Bayham Badger's late husbands and Mr Micawber's circumlocutions – but more than that, who know that all of life is contained in these marvellous, all-encompassing books vibrating with almost corporeal vividness. Like the operas of Wagner, these greedy works of art swallow you up, and make you forget that there's anything else but them. Last week I swear I inhabited my own life only barely – it was the final third of David Copperfield that seemed truly solid and real.

Yes, having been until recently an unshakeably loyal member of the haven'ts, superciliously dismissive of Dickens, I've defected and joined the haves. That is, I've read Great Expectations, Bleak House and David Copperfield. And, after an interval given over to Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair (which is utterly marvellous!) I'm straight back to Little Dorrit.

Here's Nabokov on Dickens:

"All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle."