Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens

MP3 Audio CD. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens

LITTLE DORRIT

In the time of the decline and death of Dickens, and even more strongly
after it, there arose a school of criticism which substantially
maintained that a man wrote better when he was ill. It was some such
sentiment as this that made Mr. George Gissing, that able writer, come
near to contending that Little Dorrit is Dickens's best book. It was
the principle of his philosophy to maintain (I know not why) that a man
was more likely to perceive the truth when in low spirits than when in
high spirits.


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The three articles on Sunday of which I speak are almost the last
expression of an articulate sort in English literature of the ancient
and existing morality of the English people. It is always asserted that
Puritanism came in with the seventeenth century and thoroughly soaked
and absorbed the English. We are now, it is constantly said, an
incurably Puritanic people. Personally, I have my doubts about this. I
shall not refuse to admit to the Puritans that they conquered and
crushed the English people; but I do not think that they ever
transformed it. My doubt is chiefly derived from three historical
facts. First, that England was never so richly and recognisably English
as in the Shakespearian age before the Puritan had appeared. Second,
that ever since he did appear there has been a long unbroken line of
brilliant and typical Englishmen who belonged to the Shakespearian and
not the Puritanic tradition; Dryden, Johnson, Wilkes, Fox, Nelson, were
hardly Puritans. And third, that the real rise of a new, cold, and
illiberal morality in these matters seems to me to have occurred in the
time of Queen Victoria, and not of Queen Elizabeth. All things
considered, it is likely that future