Eight Essays [antikvár]

To the Students of English 354, University of Chicago, Summer, 1939 Of all the great English writers, Charles Dickens has received in his own country the scantiest serious attention from biographers, scholars or critics. He has become for the English middle class so much one of the articles of their creed—a favorite fish, a familiar joke, a favorite dish, a beloved Christmas ritual—that it is difficult for British pundits to recognize him as the great artist and social critic he was. Dickens had no university education, and the literary men from Oxford and Cambridge, who have lately been sifting fastidiously so much of the English heritage, have rather snubbingly let him alone. The Bloomsbury that talked about Dostoevsky ignored Dostoevsky's master, Dickens. What happens when the London of Lytton Strachey does take Dickens up is shown in Hugh KingsmilFs book, The Sentimental Journey, in which the man who was called by Taine "the master of all hearts" is made into one of those Victorian scarecrows with ludicrous Freudian flaws—so infantile, pretentious, and hypocritical as to deserve only a perfunctory sneer. Since Forster's elaborate memoir, which even in the supplemented edition of Ley has never been a real biography, no authoritative book about Dickens has