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“... to public attention.James Somerset, who had been brought to England from Virginia by his owner, Charles Stewart, and managed to escape and live freely for a brief period, became the subject of a test case in 1772. Was the ownership of people legal in the ‘mother country’? Stewart had employed slave-hunters to capture Somerset and put him on a boat for ...”

“... Anne Stevenson, we soon learn, had similar expectations: ‘I had read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Henry James, and I expected England to be the book I always wanted to live in.’ But, Malcolm writes dryly, for Stevenson ‘England turned out to be another book altogether.’ Soon after the publication of Bitter Fame, Malcolm meets ...”

“... the record. And surely the James who attributed his disappointment with Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens to its having ‘too many opinions & “remarks” & not enough facts & documents’ would have welcomed the editorial scrupulousness and interpretative restraint of Horne’s Life in Letters. Lyndall Gordon also offers her book as a ...”

“... nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, whose long-smouldering rivalry as to whose was the greatest Macbeth of the age had culminated in clashes between a 15,000-strong mob and a detachment of the National Guard. Nowadays the neighbourhood hardly looks like the front line in New York ...”

“... contemporary voices in the text tend to be less unworldly. Some of them – Hazlitt, Louis Simond, Dickens, Charles Booth, Arthur Munby, ‘Walter’, Molly Hughes – are well known. Others are obscure but representative figures picked out from press reports, or nameless voices recorded from the crowds, such as the Euston ...”

“... to the public on 5 April 1838. In the same month the first instalment of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens’s third novel, was published. Together with most of London’s fashionable society, Dickens visited the Royal Academy’s summer exhibitions in order to see ‘those beautiful shiny portraits of gentlemen in black ...”

“... Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx has been one of the more intriguing literary successes of recent years, and one which raises some interesting questions about the always fraught and problematic relationship between contemporary novelists and the reading public they like to imagine themselves serving. Briefly, the situation is this ...”

“... One might find a precedent for them in Rabelais, perhaps, or in that noted Vorticist firebrand, Charles Dickens. But Lewis’s concoctions have a pungency all their own. The account in ‘Bestre’, one of the Wild Body stories, of a woman whose ‘nodular pink veil’ is an ‘apoplectic gristle’ round her stormy brow has stayed in my mind ever ...”

“... Sutherland’s Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction), biographies (Robert Patten’s Charles Dickens and His Publishers), memoirs (Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built), compendia of anecdotes (Alberto Manguel’s History of Reading), exhibition catalogues (the Folger Library’s The Reader Revealed) and maps (Franco Moretti’s ...”

“... are unconvincing – even to himself, one suspects. Trollope, he recalls, read Forster’s Life of Dickens in 1872 and ‘consciously or unconsciously’ may have echoed the blacking factory episode. (But Dickens, surely, is telling the truth about his childhood wretchedness?) A year or two after writing An ...”

“... as represented here by William Whewell, as it is in its analysis of novels by Jane Austen, Dickens and Trollope in the light of the Darwinian theory and method. The pursuit of scientific knowledge was everything to Darwin. All his correspondents were scientists – Lyell, Chambers, Owen, Hooker and so on – and all his talk was of science. Even in his ...”

“... too, such as Kut al-Amara, Qurna (as in the song, ‘If Qurna’s the garden of Eden, where the dickens is ’ell?’), Ctesiphon, Tal Afar, all had associations with triumphs and defeats of the British army. Shu’aiba, near the military encampment and air base to which British forces and officials are now retreating, leaving Basra to its fate, was also ...”

“... fascination with character and ideas, the same obsession with voices and identities and silences. Dickens, we know, used to practise impersonating his characters in the confines of his study, mugging before the mirror in order to perfect the rascally sneer of Bill Sikes or the effeminate moue of Old Mr Turveydrop. He was not alone in this, if you bear in mind ...”

“... The tenth and central chapter of Michael Slater’s biography is entitled ‘Jerrold, Dickens, Thackeray’. This, as Slater reminds us (often), is the company his contemporaries expected Douglas Jerrold to keep. Some partisans might even have thought Slater right to put him first. Dickens and Thackeray were pall-bearers at Jerrold’s funeral and, according to their contemporary David Masson, ‘the three do form a triad so that it is hardly possible to discuss the merits of any one of them without referring to the other two ...”

“... George Henry Lewes was a close contemporary of Dickens, born five years after him, in 1817, and dying eight years after him, in 1878. Both men worked themselves to the limits of their strength and endurance, and probably shortened their lives by doing so; both tend to be seen as prototypical Victorians, whereas they were formed by the Regency period and kept a certain flamboyance, together with a dislike of the insularity and hypocrisy to which they saw England succumbing ...”