text: I assume the plot of this famous tale is well known, so I won't spend time on it, but in recently re-reading this book for the first time since ninth-grade English class in the '90's, I was repeatedly struck by a piercing question: how exactly over time does drama become melodrama? Will our cherished novels seem melodramatic to readers a hundred-forty years hence? How does this happen, and is there ever an end-point to it? Dickens was by any standard a literary master, and if typifying one's age is a virtue, then he does this to perfection, yet if failing to achieve a universality unhindered by time (as other writers have done) is a limitation, then in this one sense alone Charles Dickens has an Achilles heel
  