Charles Dickens

"Throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise."

"Barkis is willin'."

"I see the line of my stories being awfully simple. It's not that I want to write mysteries, I'm talking about something more like what Dickens did, pulling strands together, weaving something I'm not very good at that. I just plunge ahead. Or I do it by trickery, by zig-zagging."

"He had his literary weaknesses, Charles Dickens, but they were all dear, big, attractive ones, virtues grown a bit wild and rank. Somehow when you put him -- with his elemental humor, his inexhaustible vitality, his humanity, sympathy, and pity -- beside the Impeccables, he always looms large."

"Little Dorrit is a more seditious book than Das Kapital. All over Europe men and women are in prison for pamphlets and speeches which are to Little Dorrit as red pepper to dynamite. Fortunately for social evolution Governments never know where to strike. Barnacle and Stiltstalking were far too conceited to recognize their own portraits."

"Not much of Dickens will live, because it has no little correspondence to life. He was the incarnation of cockneydom, a caricaturist who aped the moralist; he should have kept to short stories. If his novels are read at all in the future, people will wonder what we saw in them, save some possible element of fun meaningless to them. The world will never let Mr. Pickwick, who to me is full of the lumber of imbecility, share honors with Don Quixote."

"A splendid muse of fiction hath Charles Dickens, But now and then just as the interest thickens He stilts his pathos, and the reader sickens."

"One of Dickens’s most striking peculiarities is that, whenever in his writing he becomes emotional, he ceases instantly to use his intelligence. The overflowing of his heart drowns his head and even dims his eyes; for, whenever he is in the melting mood, Dickens ceases to be able and probably ceases even to wish to see reality. His one and only desire on these occasions is just to overflow, nothing else. Which he does, with a vengeance and in an atrocious blank verse that is meant to be poetical prose and succeeds only in being the worst kind of fustian... Mentally drowned and blinded by the sticky overflowings of his heart, Dickens was incapable, when moved, of recreating, in terms of art, the reality which had moved him, was even, it would seem, unable to perceive that reality."

"But let us not lose the use of Dickens's wit and insight, because he chooses to speak in a circle of stage fire. He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially Hard Times, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions. They will find much that is partial, and, because partial, apparently unjust; but if they examine all the evidence on the other side, which Dickens seems to overlook, it will appear, after all their trouble, that his view was the finally right one, grossly and sharply told."

"He had a large loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes. He felt sure a better feeling, and much greater union of classes, would take place in time. And I pray earnestly it may."

"Dickens was by far the best after-dinner speaker I have ever heard. , , , Mr. Parkinson, , and are good, but Dickens was above them all. For years I scarcely missed an opportunity of hearing him speak in public."

"The soul of Hogarth has migrated into the body of Dickens."

"Who calls him spurious and shoddy Shall do it over my lifeless body. I heartily invite such birds To come outside and say those words!"

"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

"Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of man in the weak modern way; he was the brotherhood of man, and knew it was a brotherhood in sin as well as in aspiration."

"The greatest of superficial novelists... It were, in our opinion, an offense against humanity to place Mr Dickens among the greatest novelists."

"One day I realized my whole life has taught me Freudianism is nonsense. My father was a sociopath and an alcoholic, and I had a terrible childhood. I didn't grow up to be a criminal or have any of the problems that I'm supposed to have. Look at Ted Bundy, who had a normal childhood but grew up to be what he was. I made a conscious decision to stop writing Freudian characters because I realized that the best characters I've ever read are in Dickens, and he never heard of Freud. I've gotten some reviews where people say my characters aren't deep enough because we don't know why they are the way they are. One of my editors once said, "We don't know what's in this guy's past that made him what he is now." He wanted me to go back and show how his parents abused him. Trite Freudian stuff. In Dickens, the idea was that character is what you do, and that's what defines you. I think that makes sense. I believe in free will and individual choice and that we make our own lives as we go along."

"George Meredith, in Edward Clodd, Memories (1916)"

"If Dickens were alive to-day he would make a trip to Soviet Russia and come back with a book rather like Gide's Retour de L'URSS."

"I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac."

"One of the greatest books ever written in the English language was called Little Dorrit, and as soon as Englishmen realised that Little Dorrit was true there would be a revolution."

"When I was a child I devoured Dickens. I think there is hardly any volume of Dickens' work that I have not read. There was something that fascinated me about the kind of life he depicted and I remember that in school I read literally all Dickens' novels. I think there was a kind of exotic nature - the transitional life of Victorian England that he captured was to me so exotic."

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."

"Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it. When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens’s works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as ‘almost’ a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as ‘almost’ a Catholic, and both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or ‘the poor’, as Chesterton would have put it)."

"Of all the Victorian novelists, he was probably the most antagonistic to the Victorian age itself."

"His eye brings in almost too rich a harvest for him to deal with, and gives him an aloofness and a hardness which freeze his sentimentalism and make it seem a concession to the public, a veil thrown over the penetrating glance which left to itself pierced to the bone. With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people on the fire."

"When people say Dickens exaggerates, it seems to me they can have no eyes and no ears. They probably have only notions of what things and people are: they accept them conventionally at their diplomatic value. Their minds run on in the region of discourse, where there are masks only, and no faces; ideas and no facts; they have little sense for those living grimaces that play from moment to moment on the countenance of the world."

"Dickens was a pure modernist — a leader of the steam-whistle party par excellence — and he had no understanding of any power of antiquity except a sort of jackdaw sentiment for cathedral towers. He knew nothing of the nobler power of superstition — was essentially a stage manager, and used everything for effect on the pit. His Christmas meant mistletoe and pudding — neither resurrection from dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds. His hero is essentially the ironmaster."

"North and South (by Elizabeth Gaskell) is really a very fine piece of work. A lot of North and South has that whole awful industrial growth in it, and she does naturally a lot better by her ladies than Dickens does, so it's really worth reading for that."

"In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself. In its attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong resemblance to Mr. Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that Little Dorrit is a favourite in the Home Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody."

"But we should get the whole Victorian perspective wrong, in my opinion at least, if we did not see that Dickens was primarily the most successful of all the onslaughts on the solid scientific school; because he did not attack from the standpoint of extraordinary faith, like Newman; or the standpoint of extraordinary inspiration, like Carlyle; or the standpoint of extraordinary detachment or serenity, like Arnold; but from the standpoint of quite ordinary and quite hearty dislike."

"The art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of enjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very human writer, had to be a very human being; he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong degree; and I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed everybody in his books even till to-day. His books are full of baffled villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the villains and cowards are such delightful people that the reader always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and make a last remark; or that the bully will say one more thing, even from the bottom of the stairs. The reader really hopes this; and he cannot get rid of the fancy that the author hopes so too."

"No gypsy on earth is a greater vagabond than myself."

"And on that grave where English oak and holly And laurel wreaths entwine, Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly, This spray of Western pine!"

"There is a heartlessness behind his sentimentally overflowing style."

"I'm teaching Dickens now in my English class [at Berkeley], and the narrator is always an even distance away from the other people. The nineteenth-century God is not that far away-he is not right next door either-but he keeps an even, middle distance away from people."

"He is not, as he forcibly remarks, ‘one of those fortunate men who, if they were to dive under one side of a barge stark–naked, would come up on the other with a new suit of clothes on, and a ticket for soup in the waistcoat–pocket:’ neither is he one of those, whose spirit has been broken beyond redemption by misfortune and want. He is just one of the careless, good–for–nothing, happy fellows, who float, cork–like, on the surface, for the world to play at hockey with: knocked here, and there, and everywhere: now to the right, then to the left, again up in the air, and anon to the bottom, but always reappearing and bounding with the stream buoyantly and merrily along."

"The dignity of his office is never impaired by the absence of efforts on his part to maintain it."

"The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, In England there shall be dear bread—in Ireland, sword and brand; And poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, So, rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, Of the fine old English Tory days; Hail to the coming time!"

"The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement... I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers... I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay"

"(Carmine Crocco) In such a crowd, so numerous and composed of such heterogeneous elements, it might have appeared almost absurd to look for discipline; but perfect discipline there was, for, whatever his other qualities might be, Crocco most undoubtedly was a "ruler of men". His word in that band was law, and the punishment of disaffection was death."

"To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart."

"I want to know what it says," he answered, looking steadily in her face. "The sea Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?"

"I put a New Testament among your books, for the very same reasons, and with the very same hopes that made me write an easy account of it for you, when you were a little child; because it is the best book that ever was or will be known in the world, and because it teaches you the best lessons by which any human creature who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty can possibly be guided. As your brothers have gone away, one by one, I have written to each such words as I am now writing to you, and have entreated them all to guide themselves by this book, putting aside the interpretations and inventions of men."

"Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine."

"Love is not a feeling to pass away, Like the balmy breath of a summer day; It is not — it cannot be — laid aside; It is not a thing to forget or hide. It clings to the heart, ah, woe is me! As the ivy clings to the old oak tree. Love is not a passion of earthly mould, As a thirst for honour, or fame, or gold: For when all these wishes have died away, The deep strong love of a brighter day, Though nourished in secret, consumes the more, As the slow rust eats to the iron’s core."

"'Who will wonder that Barbara had a headache, or that Barbara's mother was disposed to be cross, or that she slightly underrated Astley's, and thought the clown was older than they had taken him to be last night? Kit was not surprised to hear her say so--not he. He had already had a misgiving that the inconstant actors in that dazzling vision had been doing the same thing the night before last, and would do it again that night, and the next, and for weeks and months to come, though he would not be there. Such is the difference between yesterday and today. We are all going to the play, or coming home from it.'"

"How much longer are we English to assist foreign nations in misunderstand us, by holding up that ridiculous lay-figure of our race known by the style and title of John Bull?"

"That vague kind of penitence which holidays awaken next morning."

"In love of home, the love of country has its rise."