ABSTRACT
This was the Extra Christmas Number of All the Year Round, 1863. Mrs Lirriper was vastly popular, and Dickens revived her the following year, in Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy. Noticing this the Saturday Review wrote: ‘The twelve pages in which, last Christmas, Mr Dickens made her a familiar friend to so many thousands of people are perhaps the most inimitable of his performances’, but regrettably Dickens had now sentimentalized her—‘The last half of Mr Dickens’s contribution to the present number might almost have been written by the authors of the stories which make up the rest, and anything less flattering could scarcely be said’ (10 December 1864, xviii, 724–5). Probably by James Fitzjames Stephen.
