A Child's Journey with Dickens

In the late 1860s during Dickens's second American reading tour, a young Kate (around ten or eleven years old) found herself traveling on the same train from Maine toward Boston as Charles Dickens. They struck up an animated conversation about his books. Kate uninhibitedly critiqued the "long dull parts" of his novels, and the two happily discovered that David Copperfield was their mutual favorite.