ABSTRACT
Introduction Reviewing Charles Dickens's work in 1856, the leading French critic Hippolyte Taine (1828-93) wrote:
Balzac,George Sand, Stendhal have also recorded human miseries; is it possible to write without recording them? But they do not seek them out, they hit upon them; they do not dream of displaying them to us; they were going elsewhere, and met them on their way. They love art better than men.
