In 1868 appeared his "Life of Landor". On the death of his friend Alexander Dyce, Forster undertook the publication of his third edition of Shakespeare. For several years he had been collecting materials for a life of Jonathan Swift, but he interrupted his studies in this direction to write his standard "Life of Charles Dickens". He had long been intimate with the novelist, and it is by this work that John Forster is now chiefly remembered. The first volume appeared in 1872, and the biography was completed in 1874. It was clearly an important work for the late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing who wrote in his diary in January 1888, that it was "a book I constantly take up for impulse, when work at a standstill". A decade or so later Gissing was asked to revise Forster's work, and this was published by Chapman and Hall in October 1902.