Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
The young writer who attempts to report the phrase and carriage of every-day life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unworthy by people who would like to have him show how Shakespeare's men talked and looked, or Scott's, or Thackeray's, or Balzac's, or Hawthorne's, or Dickens's; he is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them, and put the book-likeness into them.
Thackeray's genius was, perhaps, less astonishing than Dickens's; less fertile, spontaneous, and inventive; but his art is sounder, and his delineation of character more truthful. After one has formed a taste for his books, Dickens's sentiment will seem overdone, and much of his humor will have the air of buffoonery.
He says of Dickens, after reading "Barnaby Rudge": "He is always prodigal and ample, but what a set of vagabonds he contrives to introduce us to!" "Barnaby Rudge" is certainly the most bohemian and esoteric of Dickens's novels. He liked much better Miss Muloch's "John Halifax," a popular book in its time, but not read very much since. He calls Charles Reade a clever and amusing writer.
I have even heard it maintained that it is better in its way than any single volume in the 'Man of Letters'; and Mr. Chesterton, who speaks from ample knowledge on this point, speaks of the best of all Dickens's critics, 'a man of genius, Mr.
I found a book, one of Charles Dickens's most amusing stories, and set myself resolutely to read it; laughing aloud at its drolleries, and reading faster and faster; while all the time thoughts came crowding into my mind of my mother's pale, worn face, and the pains she suffered, and the remedy found out too late.
But even as late as the time of Dickens's first visit to the United States, we English still felt America as a colony; an insolent, offensive, and even unintelligible colony sometimes, but still a colony; a part of our civilisation, a limb of our life. And America itself, as I have said, under all its bounce and independence, really regarded us as a mother country.
They were out of old romances about Italy and Spain, in which she was very learned; and this butcher's boy, tilting along through the crowd with a half-staggering run, was from any one of Dickens's stories, and she divined that the four-armed wooden trough on his shoulder was the butcher's tray, which figures in every novelist's description of a London street-crowd.
J B , ex-minister plenipotentiary as he was, went in for nonsense, and he, I am sure, will not soon forget how undignified we all were, and what screams of laughter went up from his own uncontrollable throat. Of course there was nothing spoken in the speeches worth remembering, but it was Dickens's manner that carried off the whole thing.
No Englishman with any sense of fact ever has taken, or could take, Dickens's characters as normal types. They are always fantastic exaggerations, full of genius occasionally, but as unlike actual reality as those illustrations by Cruikshank which are their nearest companions in the art of line.
I have been able to supplement the materials in my own collection by numerous facsimiles taken direct from a priceless store of Dickens-MSS. Here are some of the specimens. We will glance over them, and in doing so will view them, not merely as signatures, but also as permanently-recorded tracings of Dickens's nerve muscular action of his gesture.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking