ABSTRACT
Horne (1803–84), poet and miscellaneous author, was friendly with Dickens and later worked on Household Words. Dickens is the subject of the first, and much the longest, chapter in this book about eminent contemporaries (modelled on Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age, 1825). Horne duly includes the distinction Dickens had made to him (see headnote, No. 12) between Oliver Twist and ‘Newgate’ fiction: but the point he makes about Bill Sikes is new, and will remind later readers of Dickens’s peculiar attachment to the Sikes and Nancy public reading. The essay opens with a protracted comparison between Dickens and Hogarth.
