[James Fitzjames Stephen], from ‘The Licence of Modern Novelists', Edinburgh Review

Stephen, reviewing Little Dorrit with Charles Reade’s prison-novel It is never too late to mend and Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte, here continues the attacks on Dickens and ‘Light Literature’ he was mounting in the Saturday Review (see No. 99). This review in the Edinburgh started much controversy; the Leader attacked the reviewer’s ‘tone of unwarrantable assumption’ (11 July 1857, 664); the Saturday Review, not surprisingly, found great merit in Stephen’s ‘powerful and very curious article’ (18 July 1857, iv, 57). Dickens himself replied to some of Stephen’s comments, particularly his citing Sir Rowland Hill’s career as an instance of Governmental willingness to accept cheap and efficient modes of action (‘Curious Misprint in the Edinburgh Review’, Household Words, 1 August 1857, xvi, 97–100). His protest was curtly acknowledged in the Edinburgh Review (October 1857, cvi, 594).