[David Masson], from ‘Pendennis and Copperfield: Thackeray and Dickens', North British Review

Masson (1822–1907), a young Scotsman, was making a living from writing textbooks; later he became Professor of English at University College, London, and at Edinburgh, author of the Life of Milton, and editor of Macmillan’s Magazine. On Thackeray’s and Dickens’s reception of this review, see No. 74 and Masson’s Memories of London in the ’Forties (1908), 243. Some of the material from this review-article was revised and incorporated into his British Novelists and their Styles (1859), 233–53 (reprinted in The Dickens Critics, ed. G. H. Ford and L. Lane (Ithaca, 1961), 25–37). The ‘Critical Heritage’ Thackeray volume contains (pp. 111–27) a long excerpt from this article, and may be consulted for various passages omitted in the present selection.