ABSTRACT
(a)That Mr Dickens has created a new era in our popular literature cannot be denied…. This author, with a noble disdain, avoiding, or at least merely glancing at the great of the land, and those who sit in high places, has opened the inexhaustible mine of the domestic life of the masses…. But great as has been the benefit which he has bestowed on society at large, it has been accompanied by an evil, though of great magnitude, yet in the turpitude of which he in no manner shares—the multiplying around him of a horde of base imitators. He has planted a genuine English rose upon our soil—the rose flourished—and immediately a set of ignorant booksellers, taking advantage of the fertility that Mr Dickens had discovered, immediately fostered into existence a whole forest of noxious weeds and base nettles; hence sprang the felon school, of which Jack Sheppard is the type, and a host of other mean periodical productions, that have nothing in common with Master Humphrey’s Clock, except that they are produced monthly. Mr Dickens’s publications are decidedly literature. They have their own species of eloquence—they are natural, humorous, and witty in their general character; and when the occasion calls for it, they rise into pathos, and sometimes, accompanying the immortal soul of man in its loftiest flights, become really sublime. In the series of papers connected together by the horological predilections of Master Humphrey, the principal fault is the want of novelty and of art in introducing them…. We feel assured from the highly refined tone of Mr Dickens’s mind, that he will gradually incline more and more towards the classical and the elegant (June 1840, xxviii, 51–2).
