The Literary Examiner (25 November 1838)

First published in The Examiner, 25 November 1838, pp. 740–1; see headnote above, pp. 353–4. Hunt has long been recognized as ‘one of the formative influences’ of Charles Dickens’s youth (Donald Reiman, ‘Leigh Hunt in Literary History’ in The Life and Times of Leigh Hunt, ed. Robert A. McGown (Iowa City: U of Iowa Libraries, 1985) pp. 79, 95). John Forster introduced the two writers, possibly in the office of The True Sun, and by 1837 they were close friends (Blunden, 1930, p. 277). In a letter of 13 July 1838, Dickens asked Hunt to read ‘a portion’ of Oliver Twist and ‘the first four numbers’ of Nicholas Nickleby. ‘You are an old stager’, he told Hunt, ‘but a young one in faith – faith in all beautiful and excellent things’ (Dickens, Letters, vol. i, p. 414). Hunt’s reply was enthusiastic, if somewhat condescending:

Your books – How much I wish I could say all I think & feel about them!...I admire you for your wit & humour, & love you as a humanist....Your genius for the serious, & even the terrible, as well as the lively, indeed surprised me...and if I think you sometimes push the terrible too far, or into the regions of ultra-effect & melodrama, there is that in a true genius like yours (permit a much older man to say) which will ever know the nobleness of continuing to learn. (Dickens, Letters, vol. i, p. 686)

On 23 September 1838 Hunt published his Examiner review of the fifth and sixth numbers of Nickleby. Six weeks later Forster wrote that ‘Dickens...interrupts me to tell you that you are to receive an Oliver Twist “in three volumes” among the first who receive it’ (Brewer, Letters, p. 250). Dickens himself wrote a few days later to say that he ‘should like to have a note from you when you have skimmed over such part…as is new to you’ (Dickens, Letters, vol. i, p. 452). Hunt responded with a two-part Examiner review, comprised of the present essay and an earlier instalment of 18 November that consisted mainly of extracts. He raised ‘a few critical objections’, and described ‘the somewhat trivial creations of Rose and Harry Maylie’ as ‘a failure’ (see below, p. 370). But he had high praise for the novel: ‘Who is there of its many thousand readers that cannot recall the face of almost every person in the book, the air, the attitude, the dress, well nigh as familiar to him as his own?’, he asks (see below, p. 368). Four months later, he continued to

read & re-read Oliver...The charity-boy, poor Nancy, the Jew, the Dodger (especially before the magistrate) & Charley Bates, an exquisite; so is the 367beadle; but what indeed is not, except perhaps the gentler part of the sentiment which is somewhat melodramatic & assumed. Folly-Ditch is Dante Newgatistes. (Gates, Letters, p. 349)

In the two decades that followed, Hunt remained a great admirer of Dickens, but their later relationship was marred by Dickens’s unkind portrait of him as Skimpole in Bleak House (1852–3). For more information, see Alex W. Brice, ‘Reviewers of Dickens in The Examiner’ in Dickens Studies Newsletter, 3 (September 1972), pp. 68-80; and Richard D. Altick, ‘Harold Skimpole Revisited’ in The Life and Times of Leigh Hunt, ed. Robert A. McCown (Iowa City: U of Iowa Libraries, 1985), pp. 1–15.