ABSTRACT
Crabb Robinson (1775–1867), diarist and bookman. A former journalist and barrister, and acquaintance of successive generations of literary men, he records in his diary his serial reading of most of Dickens’s novels. But ‘I shall read no more of Dickens’s things in numbers,’ he had decided (14 February 1841), after finishing The Old Curiosity Shop. It was a resolution he could rarely keep, though Barnaby had been running for six months before he succumbed. See also No. 79.
