Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens

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Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works?by G. K. Chesterton

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Title: Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens
Author: G. K. Chesterton
Release Date: August 20, 2007 [EBook #22362]
Language: English
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[Illustration: Charles Dickens, Circa 1840 From an oil painting by R. J. Lane.]
APPRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
[Illustration]
1911
LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
All rights reserved

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION vii II. SKETCHES BY BOZ 1 III. PICKWICK PAPERS 13 IV. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY 26 V. OLIVER TWIST 38 VI. OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 50 VII. BARNABY RUDGE 65 VIII. AMERICAN NOTES 76 IX. PICTURES FROM ITALY 87 X. MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 90 XI. CHRISTMAS BOOKS 103 XII. DOMBEY AND SON 114 XIII. DAVID COPPERFIELD 129 XIV. CHRISTMAS STORIES 140 XV. BLEAK HOUSE 148 XVI. CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND 160 XVII. HARD TIMES 169 XVIII. LITTLE DORRIT 178 XIX. A TALE OF TWO CITIES 188 XX. GREAT EXPECTATIONS 197 XXI. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND 207 XXII. EDWIN DROOD 218 XXIII. MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK 229 XXIV. REPRINTED PIECES 239

ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
CHARLES DICKENS, CIRCA 1840 Frontispiece From an oil painting by R. J. Lane.
CHARLES DICKENS, 1842 76 From a bust by H. Dexter, executed during Dickens's first visit to America.
CHARLES DICKENS, 1844 90 From a miniature by Margaret Gillies.
CHARLES DICKENS, 1849 130 From a daguerreotype by Mayall.
CHARLES DICKENS, 1858 184 From a black and white drawing by Baughiet.
CHARLES DICKENS, 1859 188 From an oil painting by W. P. Frith, R.A.
CHARLES DICKENS, CIRCA 1860 198 Photograph by J. & C. Watkins.
CHARLES DICKENS, 1868 218 From a photograph by Gurney.

INTRODUCTION
These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries of the classics which are one of the real improvements of recent times. Thus they were harmless, being diluted by, or rather drowned in Dickens. My scrap of theory was a mere dry biscuit to be taken with the grand tawny port of great English comedy; and by most people it was not taken at all--like the biscuit. Nevertheless the essays were not in intention so aimless as they appear in fact. I had a general notion of what needed saying about Dickens to the new generation, though probably I did not say it. I will make another attempt to do so in this prologue, and, possibly fail again.
There was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin to realise that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed vulgar--all that is itself breaking up like a cloudland. And only the caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone. This, of course, is an old story in the case of a man reproached with any excess of the poetic. Again and again when the man of visions was pinned by the sly dog who knows the world,
"The man recovered of the bite, The dog it was that died."
To call Thackeray a cynic, which means a sly dog, was indeed absurd; but it is fair to say that in comparison with Dickens he felt himself a man of the world. Nevertheless, that world of which he was a man is coming to an end before our eyes; its aristocracy has grown corrupt, its middle class insecure, and things that he never thought of are walking about the drawing-rooms of both. Thackeray has described for ever the Anglo-Indian Colonel; but what on earth would he have done with an Australian Colonel? What can it matter whether Dickens's clerks talked cockney now that half the duchesses talk American? What would Thackeray have made of an age in which a man in the position of Lord Kew may actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Wardour Street? Nor does this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians who prided themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions; it applies to Anthony Trollope and, as much as any one, to George Eliot. For