This book consists of twelve chapters of supposed first-person confessions by Charles Dickens written on twelve separate days in 1870, beginning on January 23, and ending on the morning of June 8, the day of Dickens’s fatal seizure. Some of these recollections and reflections are fictitious, but everything is based on known facts, or opinions expressed in speeches or letters, and evidence either in his novels or elsewhere for the author’s original conjectures.