After Dickens what? You well may ask.

Here's the exchange behind the title.

Two Italian art historians – Italians who also do Italian Art history – in an American museum, examining one of its Tuscan jewels.

“Pontormo,” the younger skeptically asks, “or only After Pontormo?”

“After, certamente,” confidently replies the elder.

“Certamente, it's certainly a Pontormo,” hisses, from behind them, the collection's Curator. All along he's been silently trailing them through the gallery.

“Well, yes. Probably it was a Pontormo,” the elder concedes, “once.”

Safely away from the Curator's baleful glare, the older Historian explains – to me – what he meant. The original canvas has been so thoroughly overpainted that, whatever might remain beneath, nothing now visible on the surface can possibly lay claim to have been put there by Pontormo's hand.

Ironically, the correct art-historical term for that process of painting-over/painting-out is restoration. But if Pontormo had been a writer rather than a painter, the equivalent term would be adaptation. And – here's where I, and this book, come in – if Pontormo had been Dickens, that is a writer not a painter, there'd never be any question that he could ever be anything but, as my Italian friends would say, in restauro: under restoration. Or, in literary terms, under adaptation.