[G. H. Lewes?], from a review of Sketches, Pickwick, and Oliver Twist, in the National Magazine and Monthly Critic

Attributed to Lewes by the Pilgrim Letters editors (i, 403n), and by Kathleen Tillotson (Oliver Twist, Clarendon edn. (Oxford, 1966), 309). Years later, Lewes recalled how ‘something I had written on [Pickwick] pleased him [Dickens], and caused him to ask me to call on him’ (Fortnightly Review, 1872, xvii, 152). The National Magazine was one of the series of journals with which this ‘Prince of Journalists’ (as Carlyle called him) was associated. Lewes (1817–78) was one of the most accomplished critics of the novel during the mid-century; see also Nos. 80, 158. Dickens wrote to him, probably in June 1838, an unusually self-exploratory letter. The Pilgrim editors (i, 403n) suggest, doubtless rightly, that Lewes, who was much interested in mental phenomena, had been enquiring about the passage in Oliver Twist, Ch. xxxiv, about the state of mind between sleeping and waking. Dickens wrote: