[Thomas Henry Lister], from a review of Sketches (1st and 2nd Series), Pickwick, Nickleby, and Oliver Twist, Edinburgh Review

Lister (1800–42), a minor novelist, dramatist and historian, held various official appointments, and was, from 1836, Registrar-General. Dickens was delighted by this review: ‘It is all even I could wish, and what more can I say!’ (Pilgrim, i, 438). Irma Rantavaara comments that it was a reaction against the criticisms in the Quarterly (see No. 16), and that Lister was the first critic to suggest the comparison between Dickens and Hogarth, which became very popular (Dickens in the Light of English Criticism (Helsinki, 1944), 92).