Here is something that over Dickens fans may have noticed, but I had not. There appears to be at least one canonical crossover or "shared universe" fiction in the Dickens canon. Accordng to my friend Jeff Bloomfield on deviantart:
As a matter of fact Dickens did (once) have a cross-over (and by the way, I don't recall Mr. Brownlow being mentioned in "Bleak House" - I would have noticed that). I mentioned that Dickens (in 1840) had started a new work, "Master Humphrey's Clock" that had a bunch of friends visiting Master Humphrey each month, and one would entertain the others with a story. In this book Dickens brought back Samuel Pickwick, Sam Weller, and Toby Weller as members of the group, and Pickwick and the older Weller tell some of the stories. The series never really made it. Dickens started a story in it about a little girl and her foolish grandfather who get mired in debt to a nasty money-lending dwarf, and slowly it expanded beyond a short story and became "The Old Curiosity Shop". When he ends that tragic novel (poor Nell), Dickens returns to Master Humphrey's Shop to reveal that it was Nell's grand uncle who was telling of the tragedy. That was the last we heard of Master Humphrey's Clock. The next book was "Barnaby Rudge" which was longer than "The Old Curiosity Shop".
That's something to keep in mind in regard to the upcoming BBC series the Dickensian, which has characters from all of Dickens' novels inhabiting the same "universe."
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