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Updated: May 2, 2025
I have heard a mother repeat, with a pathetic pride, a connected sentence said by her idiot boy. You remember how delighted Miss Trotwood was, in Mr. Dickens's beautiful story, with Mr. Dick's good sense, when he said something which in anybody else would have been rather silly. But Mr. Dick, you see, was just out of the Asylum, and no more.
"Extra- not anti-" that is the key. The worlds of Dickens, of Balzac, and of Meredith are not impossible worlds: for the only worlds which are impossible are those which are inconsistent with themselves, and none of these is that. Something has been said of the "four dimensions" which are necessary to work Dickens's world, and our business here is not with Balzac's.
It was his cordial and picturesque description of the great holiday of Christendom which preceded and stimulated Dickens's Christmas Carols and Thackeray's Holiday Tales. It was the genial spirit of Christmas, native to his gentle heart and his happy temperament, which made Irving, as Thackeray called him, a peacemaker between the mother-country and her proud and sensitive offspring of the West.
William Archer has kindly read the proof sheets and made valuable suggestions, but is responsible for none of my theories. ANDREW LANG. ST. ANDREWS, September 4, 1905. For the discovery of Dickens's secret in Edwin Drood it is necessary to obtain a clear view of the characters in the tale, and of their relations to each other.
Among the many notable features of this veritable chef-d'oeuvre of under 250 pages is the sense it conveys of the superb gusto of Dickens's actual living and breathing and being, the vindication achieved of two ordinarily rather maligned novels, The Old Curiosity Shop and Little Dorrit, and the insight shown into Dickens's portraiture of women, more particularly those of the shrill-voiced and nagging or whining variety, the 'better halves' of Weller, Varden, Snagsby and Joe Gargery, not to speak of the Miggs, the Gummidge, and the M'Stinger.
The very laugh that made the whole house vibrate, the roundness and fulness of voice, the fury of superlatives, are all given in Dickens's best manner, and no one who has ever seen Landor for half an hour could possibly mistake Boythorn for anybody else.
This was the year of Dickens's visit to America, and Willis was present at the 'Boz Ball, where he danced with Mrs. Dickens, to whom he afterwards did the honours of Broadway. In 1843 Willis made up his difference with Morris, and again became joint-editor of the Mirror, which, a year later, was changed from a weekly to a daily paper.
He had no mean modern notion of keeping the moral doubtful. He would have regarded this as a mere piece of slovenliness, like leaving the last page illegible. Everywhere in Dickens's work these angles of his absolute opinion stood up out of the confusion of his general kindness, just as sharp and splintered peaks stand up out of the soft confusion of the forests.
The uneasy caricature which mars Dickens's picture of the upper, and even the upper middle, classes is as much absent from his work as the complete want of familiarity with the lower which appears, for instance, in Bulwer.
They are, in the full sense of the word, household books, as indispensable as Shakspeare or Milton, Scott or Irving. We may fairly say of the various editions of Dickens's writings, that their "name is Legion." None of them all, however, is better adapted to common libraries than the new edition now publishing in New York.
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