“My own experience in reading Dickens, and I doubt whether it is an uncommon one, is to be bounced between violent admiration and violent distaste almost every couple of paragraphs, and this is too uncomfortable a condition to be much alleviated by an inward recital of one’s duty not to be fastidious, to gulp the stuff down in gobbets like a man.”
Kingsley Amis, What Became of Jane Austen?