ABSTRACT
… Mr Honeythunder is a mere wooden figure, as lifeless as that which Mr Quilp was in the habit of belabouring, pretty much in the same spirit as that in which Mr Dickens belabours sham philanthropists, though from less amiable motives. The worst of it is that Honey-thunder, whilst fully as grotesque as any of Mr Dickens’s earlier creations, is far less amusing, simply because a man when he is over fifty cannot design grotesques with the spirit which he possessed when he was under thirty. The oddity, as we have said, remains, but oddity requires to be carried off by a certain reckless audacity which is only to be expected from a youthful writer. Honeythunder, it is to be added, is only a subsidiary character, as he is one of the least satisfactory in the book; but the same taint of mannerism and forced humour is more or less evident in most of the other actors.
