[Samuel Lucas], from a review of The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, The Times

Lucas (1818–68), an Oxford man and a barrister, was a frequent contributor to The Times. He correctly interpreted Dickens’s intentions: the emotions aroused by the Indian Mutiny (in which one of his own sons was at risk) provoked him to one of his few fictional expressions of simple patriotic sentiment. See To Miss Coutts, 4 October and 25 November 1857, and To Henry Morley, 18 October 1857. The History of ‘The Times’ misleadingly summarizes this review as rebuking Dickens for being sentimental (ii, 487). Lucas in fact applauds Dickens’s venture into the heroic, though realising that he will probably be faulted in ‘the prevalent spirit on criticism’ (i.e., the attacks on Dickens in the Saturday Review and elsewhere in 1857): but even the Saturday Review called a truce in its vendetta with Dickens, to accord to The Perils a ‘cordial commendation on very high grounds’, gladly ‘embracing the opportunity’ to demonstrate that it could praise Dickens for work such as this (26 December 1857, 579).