Charles Dickens: A critical study

Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this, that we confuse the word “indefinable” with the word “vague.” If some one speaks of a spiri...

Charles Dickens was born at Landport, in Portsea, on February 7, 1812. His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay-office, and was temporarily on duty in the neighbourhood. Very soon...

There are popular phrases so picturesque that even when they are intentionally funny they are unintentionally poetical. I remember, to take one instance out of many, hearing a h...

Round the birth of “Pickwick” broke one of those literary quarrels that were too common in the life of Dickens. Such quarrels indeed generally arose from some definite mistake o...

There is one aspect of Charles Dickens which must be of interest even to that subterranean race which does not admire his books. Even if we are not interested in Dickens as a gr...

The essential of Dickens’s character was the conjunction of common sense with uncommon sensibility. The two things are not, indeed, in such an antithesis as is commonly imagined...

In the July of 1844 Dickens went on an Italian tour, which he afterwards summarized in the book called “Pictures from Italy.” They are, of course, very vivacious, but there is n...

Dickens was back in London by the June of 1845. About this time he became the first editor of _The Daily News_, a paper which he had largely planned and suggested, and which, I...

I have deliberately in this book mentioned only such facts in the life of Dickens as were, I will not say significant (for all facts must be significant, including the million f...

All criticism tends too much to become criticism of criticism; and the reason is very evident. It is that criticism of creation is so very staggering a thing. We see this in the...

In one of the plays of the decadent period, an intellectual expressed the atmosphere of his epoch by referring to Dickens as “a vulgar optimist.” I have in a previous chapter su...

The hardest thing to remember about our own time, of course, is simply that it is a time; we all instinctively think of it as the Day of Judgment. But all the things in it which...