[James Fitzjames Stephen], from ‘Mr Dickens as a Politician', Saturday Review

Stephen (1829–94), son of the civil servant Sir James Stephen and brother of Leslie Stephen; lawyer, judge (from 1879), authority on legal history; created baronet, 1891. Stephen had attacked Dickens—particularly his pathos—in Cambridge Essays (1855), and was a prominent contributor to the Saturday Review from its inception (1855: see Introduction, p. 13). Also contributed to the Edinburgh Review (see No. 104) and other journals. For the background to his fierce contempt for ‘Light Literature’, see Leslie Stephen, Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1895), 155–61, 180, 345. For him (Leslie Stephen remarked, p. 155), ‘A novel should be a serious attempt by a grave observer to draw a faithful portrait of the actual facts of life. A novelist, therefore, who uses the imaginary facts, like Sterne and Dickens, as mere pegs on which to hang specimens of his own sensibility and facetiousness, becomes disgusting…. He, therefore, considers Robinson Crusoe to represent the ideal novel.’ This aesthetic dogma helps to explain Fitzjames Stephen’s reaction to Dickens, but the animosity arises also from his family protective feeling towards the machinery of government and administration, and from the communal Saturday Review tone of cantankerous superiority and dismissiveness. The Saturday Review campaign against Dickens was (falsely) rumoured to have caused him to collapse into bed, ill.