ABSTRACT
(Letter to Duffy, 12 December 1871) ‘The whole world is, in these very days and weeks, full of Forster and his Life of Dickens, for which there is a perfect rage or public famine (copies not to be supplied fast enough)…. It is curious, and in part surprising; yields a true view of Dickens (great part of it being even of his own writing)…. Me nothing in it so surprised as these two American explosions around poor Dickens, all Yankee-doodle-dom blazing up like one universal soda water bottle round so very measurable a phenomenon, this and the way the phenomenon takes it, was curiously and even genially interesting to me, and significant of Yankee-doodle-dom.’ (Charles Gavan Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle (1892), 245).
