Allan Conrad Christensen is Professor Emeritus of English at John Cabot University, Rome. Besides many articles on works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he has written books on Bulwer Lytton, Ruffini and narratives of contagion and has edited books on Keats, Bulwer Lytton and Dickens. The principle of making/ unmaking, upon which the present monograph focuses, has fascinated him from the beginning of his career. His Ph.D. dissertation on the fictions of Carlyle (Princeton, 1968) concentrates especially on the metaphor of tailoring/ re-tailoring in terms of which Sartor Resartus imagines all the workings of Nature and human life. His collection of essays by many scholars in The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton (2004) indicates their common perception of Bulwer’s art as an undoing activity. The theme of what is unmade similarly dominates his most recent book, Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion: ‘Our feverish contact’ (2005). The negative emphasis also underlies his contribution, entitled ‘Broken Dialogues’, to the recent volume, Dialogic Dickens (2015), in the present CrossWays series. The phenomena under investigation are never purely negative since the unmaking and making remain inseparable.