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Shakespeare and Milton: unsurpassable in the English canon. Milton’s mature poetry stands for perfection, Shakespeare’s for a wholeness of vision verging on the truly religious. Their examples cannot be rivalled, only followed. Dickens chose to follow Shakespeare. And now D. J. Taylor trails Dickens.

Derby Day is a story about—wait for it—the Derby. A spectacular race-horse by the name of Tiberius has fallen into the hands of Mr Davenant who lives quietly in Lincolnshire. Soon he is not living quite so quietly. A brash young man from London begins to take a professional interest in Mr Davenant’s debts – and an even keener interest in his horse.

Safebreakers, disgraced military men, the cream (or the scum) of the sporting gentlemen of London, and an implacable police commander are gradually drawn into a series of intrigues which inevitably converge on the day of the great race itself. In the course of these adventures we slip from taking tea in the drawing rooms of Belgrave Square to dodging laundry bills in the rookeries of the City; we rove across the foggy flats of Lincolnshire, and we make ourselves at home in the suburban front parlours of Richmond.

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Dickensian are the settings, the characters, the themes (love, greed and the home) and, playfully, the style. It opens with a dull echo of the fog which sets the scene in Bleak House: ‘Sky the colour of a fish’s underside; grey smoke diffusing over a thousand house-fronts; a wind moving from the east: London’. With another Dickensian turn of phrase, Taylor pictures a street: ‘a cab rank at which no cab was ever seen standing, and a murky tobacconist’s over whose lintel no customer in search of enlightenment from the copies of The Raff’s Journal and The Larky Swell that hang in the window was ever known to tread’. And when the first characters appear, we are told that ‘one of them, taller and perhaps older, imagined himself to be a figure of consequence, and that the other, smaller and perhaps younger, was happy to support him in this belief’. The tone is gentle, but the eye is keen. It is Boz! Well, almost.

Pastiche? Parody? Tribute? The whole novel is written as if it were a Victorian novel. Satire about ‘the Pimlico squares that are such a godsend to respectable middle-class people on modest incomes’ is in the present tense. References to such mysteries of everyday Victorian life as ‘Oxford mixture’ go unexplained. Not without the odd sly glance, however. When Taylor writes of a place that has ‘a rather dismal and moral air, as if great truths about human nature could be extracted from it if only you knew where to look’, it is a joke about what Dickens is really about. It is a joke about the way that things have such weight in Dickens, about the way that when Dickens describes the world it is as a squalid place of moral grandeur in which every last scrap can bear a burden of struggle, love, triumph, failure – a joke about what Derby Day is, ultimately, not.

But then it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s an entertaining yarn compelling enough to be forgiven its logical shortcomings. Why, indeed, would a man rob a jewellers to raise capital when his father-in-law will lend him as much money as he wants? Despite leaving too many loose ends to be summarily tied up, the increasingly contrived conclusion does not spoil the fun. There are also some gestures towards grander themes, as an old order makes way for new, that no well-bred historical novel would think it proper to ignore. Without, however, any clear sense of the decade (or even quarter) of the 19th century in which the novel is set, such attempts feel like a stab at doing the right thing rather than heartfelt commitment.

So it’s enjoyable rather than profound. And is that criticism or commendation? Both of course – and neither.