ABSTRACT
To Yates's delight, hardly a 'dissentient voice' was to be heard amid the chorus of praise that greeted the book. He had predicted 'kindly reviews' in most of the major journals, albeit with 'plenty of yapping from the smaller dogs',3 but the warmth of the critical reception nevertheless surprised him. He had had no idea, he told Escott, that 'our brethren of the quill wd. have come out so strong'; and while adding that they were no doubt actuated to some extent by 'delight at not finding themselves scalped, 8c their most secret vices unmasked', he cannot have failed to see that much of the appreciation was sincere and well founded.4 Both publicly and privately he was receiving testimony, even from partisans of Thackeray, to the equanimity and fairmindedness of his chapter, 'The Garrick Club and My "Difficulty" Therewith'; and Louis Jennings, now an M.P. and no longer on the staff of the World,
held out the hope that, with time, his friends might even get him reelected to the Club.5 His 'Dickens Chapter' was much praised for its tender but 'manly' tone, avoiding excessive idolatry and sentimentality and not exaggerating his own importance in his hero's eyes.6 The sharpness and accuracy of his early memories of London were particularly, and deservedly, admired. By any standards, Recollections is among the very best literary autobiographies of the mid-Victorian period, and it remains an invaluable record of many aspects of life in London between the 1840s and the early 1870s.
