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“... spirit, which may be good for society but bad for their achievement in art. The best doubles – Dickens is the prime case – are in some degree somnambulists, whose powers depend on working in obscurity and breaking out in unfamiliar fashion on the page. Miller writes on Martin Amis as ‘the latest of Anglo-America’s dualistic artists’ for whom ‘the ...”

“... outpatients’ department used to be the Strand Union Workhouse. It’s also been discovered that Dickens once lived in the same street, and the Georgian workhouse has been saved from demolition because it’s reckoned, on evidence detailed by Ruth Richardson in Dickens and the Workhouse, that it must be the most famous ...”

“... as Bulwer-Lytton tried to prove that his wife was mad and Robinson insisted that his was sane, Dickens caused consternation by publicly announcing his separation from his wife. In August a letter Dickens had written to his friend and manager Arthur Smith, with permission to show it to anyone he chose, appeared in the New ...”

“... throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century. Realism as we know it from Stendhal, Dickens, Tolstoy onwards entered German literature relatively late in the day and has been powerfully challenged by other modes of writing. Thus Thomas Mann’s very last work, the unfinished Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man of 1954, is a picaresque ...”

“... Alfred Dickens, the novelist’s brother, wrote a General Board of Health report on the area soon to be occupied by the Olympic athletes, recording that ‘the cholera raged’ and there was ‘neither drainage nor paving’ – ‘in winter the streets were impassable.’ More recently it was a site of old warehouses and weedy dereliction ...”

“... encounter, full of joy Unscheduled on the Giesen Plan, With, here, an addict of Tolkien, There, a Charles Williams fan.If Auden were on the circuit now, he’d still find plenty of Tolkien addicts, but he’d go a long way before stumbling on a Charles Williams fan. Charles Williams ...”

“... one who wrote as much as Stephen could avoid repeating themselves) is the failure of novelists, Dickens above all, to give an accurate representation of society. By this he did not mean some failure of imaginative power: he meant that they got their facts wrong. Moreover, they (Dickens again being the main culprit) went ...”

“... At first Dickens tried to deny that Harold Skimpole, the parasitical aesthete of Bleak House, had been based on his friend Leigh Hunt; but later he confessed, not a little proudly, that the character was ‘the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words . . . it is an absolute reproduction of a real man ...”

“... newly added as a frontispiece to the Collected Poems, and its comic note: ‘The other man is Charles Coffin, a patient and understanding listener, as the picture shows. We would be discussing a 17th-century poet; I do not think I ever discussed my own poetry like that.’ Using Biography is devoted to six authors: Marvell, Dryden, Fielding, Yeats, Eliot ...”

“... finding totally new felicities as well as confirming old ones. But let us raise the hat again to Charles Fletcher who, the 1953 Preface tells us, supplied the first, 1941, book with all its selections from Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Tennyson and Dryden. Of course the quarter-century gap between the second and third editions has brought in new names. Four ...”

“... books and manuscripts. His library included autographed first editions of novels by the Brontës, Dickens and Thackeray and nearly everything that he could find associated with Robert Louis Stevenson. He also had a number of trophy items like Shakespeare’s First Folio (though copies of the Folio were not so hard to find: his contemporary Henry Folger ...”

“... fewer noble secrets than walk abroad among men shut up in the breast’ of such a person. This is Dickens, introducing the solicitor Tulkinghorn in Bleak House. But it might equally well be John Juxon, describing George Lewis. Lewis was no legal scholar. But if he was not unusually learned in the law, he was, judging from the demand for his services once his ...”

“... in clusters. In the last decade there have been four authoritative biographies of Trollope; two of Dickens; two of Wilkie Collins; three of Stevenson (one down, two to come); and – with the present centennial haul – three of Tennyson. Given the huge expenditure of scholarly energy modern biography demands it would be rational to redistribute some of ...”

“... any tomb-robbing researcher. They will themselves incinerate mountains of correspondence (as did Dickens) or enjoin survivors to do it for them (like Auden). They will dictate to puppet biographers the ‘true’ story of their lives (like Hardy or Nabokov). The most determined will arrange to disappear from the face of the earth, like Thomas Pynchon, a ...”

“... Even a smile​ could put Charles Lamb in mind of death. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’.I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets … Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and Summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could ...”