[John Forster], from an unsigned review, Examiner

This review (much delayed: see headnote to No. 55) opens with Forster on the defensive against the new rage for Thackeray, but he had reviewed Vanity Fair generously in the Examiner, 22 July 1848 (see Thackeray: the Critical Heritage, 53–8). The author of Two Old Men’s Tales (1834) is Mrs Anne Marsh. On Miss Tox’s exclamation at the end of ch. xvi, subsequently deleted by Dickens, see articles by Kathleen Tillotson and D. S. Bland, Dickensian, March 1951 and Summer 1956.