Dickens says he concentrates on 'the romantic side of familiar things', and so highlights the visionary, non-realist, uncanny nature of his writing. This book delves into the sources of that through Shakespeare, and Fuseli, the great artist who imagined scenes from Shakespeare and who created the 'Nightmare', and Blake, friend of Fuseli, and a silent underpresence in nineteenth-century writing. It provides readings of the Christmas Books, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend in the light of Shakespeare, Fuseli, and Blake. While concentrating on the figure of the marginalised beggar, and the criminal, and the vagrant, so finding a social history between Shakespeare and Dickens's time, it reads literary texts in the light of critical theory, using Blanchot, and Derrida, and Deleuze to illuminate the text and the power of writing within Shakespeare, Blake, and Dickens.