Charles Dickens and other Victorians

All save one of the papers here collected were written as lectures and read from a desk at Cambridge; the exception being that upon Trollope, contributed to _The Nation and the...

“To be presented to a Pogram,” said Miss Codger, “by a Hominy, indeed a thrilling moment is it in its impressiveness on what we call our feelings. But why we call them so, and w...

“Othello,” as Hartley Coleridge noted, “could not brag more amorously”: and, as I wrote the other day in an introduction to _The Merry Wives_, when Anne finally persuades him to...

But this admirable plot, with all the Bardell _versus_ Pickwick business, and the second most excellent “reversal of fortune” when Mrs. Bardell, the prosecutrix, herself gets ca...

Moreover--and mind you this--you will never understand Charles Dickens until you realise how exquisitely, how indignantly the genius in this child of the blacking-warehouse felt...

Further--and to conclude on this point--over and beyond its infertility of thought, Dickens’ is a world in which technical or professional skill never comes into play to promote...

But Landor and Leigh Hunt, you may say, were literary men of their hands, well able to defend themselves. Well, then, take down your _David Copperfield_ and compare the Miss Mow...

or the yellow sands of Prospero’s island where the elves curtsy, kiss and dance, or Sindbad’s cave, or those others “measureless to man” rushed through by Alph the sacred river...

Oxbridge, then, in _Pendennis_ is Cambridge. Thackeray came up in February, 1829--in the Lent term, that is, instead of in the previous October--I cannot discover for what reaso...

As a rule, Gentlemen, I hold it idle for a lecturer to talk about an author with whom he has to confess an imperfect sympathy. There are so many others, worth admiring, whom he...

“When I say,” he affirms, “that I hardly know any master of English prose-rhythm greater, in his way, than Thackeray, and that I certainly do not know any one with so various an...

We all recognise it now, and the wicked folly of it--or at least I hope we do. My purpose to-day, Gentlemen, is not to excite vain emotions over a past which neither you nor I c...

But I recall myself to my purpose; which in two following lectures shall be as literary, as merely critical, as I can keep it. To-day I have set out the theme and tried to show...

But the tenets of this Young England party which gathered so eagerly about the maturer man, Disraeli, were these, as you know: the King stood over all, with his prerogative to b...

You can fancy, now, the hoards of vengeance in his heart against the employers. For there are never wanting those who, either in speech or in print, find it their interest to ch...

But time, which should bring the philosophic mind, will lead most critics who follow criticism sincerely to the happy conviction that there are no rules for the operation of gen...

Shakespeare, William, 8, 21–23, 26, 28, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36, 43, 45, 49, 50, 53, 57, 66, 67, 81, 83, 91, 100, 101, 114, 128, 149, 158, 217, 222