Leon Garfield's novels have been compared, both in content and style, to those by several other important British writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and especially Victorian novelist Charles Dickens. The gang of boy thieves in Footsteps, for instance, recalls Fagan's gang in Oliver Twist, and William's naivete suggests the gullibility of young David Copperfield.

The impediments of the British legal system, satirized so devastatingly in Dickens's Bleak House, also surface in Footsteps, as the inhabitants of Foxes Court raise obstacles for William. The law clerk Jenkins sends him a complicated letter and later disclaims it, saying that it is unsigned and therefore "ain't a legal document." Jenkins's distrust of others is explained succinctly: "Lawyers and their clerks tell so many lies that they always think everybody else is lying."

The plight of London's poor, a frequent theme of Dickens's novels, is also...