[Samuel Warren], from a review in Blackwood's Magazine

Warren (1807–77), barrister and author of the highly successful Ten Thousand a Year (1839–41) and other novels, considered himself Dickens’s equal or superior, and proposed to John Blackwood a ‘fair, prudent, and real review [of American Notes]—bearing in mind my own position as a sort of honourable yet fearless rival of his’. While acknowledging Dickens’s genius in American Notes, he detected ‘mannerism; exaggeration’, glaring but unconscious egotism & vanity; glympses of underbreeding. These last I should touch on in a manly and delicate & generous spirit. Rely on Sam Warren… Oh what a book I could have written!!! I mean I who have not only observed but reflected so much on the characters of the people of England and America’ (quoted in K. J. Fielding’s ‘American Notes and some English reviewers’, Modern Language Review, lix (1964), 527–37). Warren offered Dickens some more lofty advice in Blackwood’s, November 1846, lx, 636–9 (discussing No. 1 of Dombey). In the present review, he surveys Dickens’s early career and popularity, hints that his ‘early education, opportunities, habits, acquirements, and society’ were not altogether impressive, and then turns to his book on America.