"Dickens" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... becoming a principal feature in their work. The classical and Renaissance manufacturers of modern times having silenced the independent language of the operative, his humor and satire pass away in the word-wit which has of late become the especial study of the group of authors headed by Charles Dickens; all this power was formerly thrown into noble art, and became permanently expressed in the sculptures of the cathedral. It was never thought that there was anything discordant or improper in such a position: for the builders evidently felt very ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... heard of crost fights, And certain gains, by certain lost fights; I rather fancies that its news, How in a mill, both men should lose; [1] For vere the odds are thus made even, It plays the dickens with the steven: [2] Besides, against all rule they're sinning, Vere neither has no chance of vinning. Ri, tol, ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... deal of this sort of thing—I've had charge of lunatics—and the only thing I know of for the case is to stimulate memory of the patient's actual past life. But we know nothing about Mrs. Prichard. Who the dickens ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Chief, "what the dickens have you got on your mind now? I ought to skin Carnes alive for talking out of turn, but if you really have an idea, I'll forgive him. What ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... Albert, the key of the district. The town of Battleford was besieged by the Indians, but they were successfully kept in check for weeks until the place was relieved. Fort Pitt was evacuated by Inspector Dickens, a son of the great novelist, who succeeded in taking his little force of police into Battleford. Two French missionaries and several white men were ruthlessly murdered at Frog Lake by a band of Crees, and two women were dragged ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... '"What the dickens," says Clifford, "can you want, going away with this familiar of yours at this hour of the night? You're like the fellow in Scott's novel ('Anne of Geierstein') that I was reading over again yesterday—the mysterious stranger ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... author is very much in vogue now, and is helpful in many ways. For instance, an evening with Dickens is observed in the following way: A number will personate the leading characters in any of Dickens' works, talking only in language and tone suited to the character, the invited guests ascertaining from his acquaintance with Dickens just where they belong. This ...
— Why and how: a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada • Addie Chisholm
... gentleman, and seemingly anxious to have Froude become an eligible, and I judged from the rather fierce manner in which he handled a club he had in his hand, that there were one or two other men of prominence still living he was anxious to meet. Dickens, too, was desirous of a two-minute interview with certain of his at present purely mortal critics; and, between you and me, if the wink that Bacon gave Shakespeare when I spoke of Ignatius Donnelly meant anything, the famous ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... go on comparing Thackeray and Dickens, quite cheerfully. But the fashion of comparing Maltby and Braxton went out so long ago as 1795. No, I am wrong. But anything that happened in the bland old days before the war does seem to be a hundred more years ago than actually ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... rule, I forbear; but some of Sir William's quotations are so extraordinarily apt that they deserve a permanent place in the annals of table-talk. That fine old country gentleman, the late Lord Knightley (who was the living double of Dickens's Sir Leicester Dedlock), had been expatiating after dinner on the undoubted glories of his famous pedigree. The company was getting a little restive under the recitation, when Sir William was heard to say, in an appreciative aside, "This reminds me ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... alas! can be dirty like the rest, when necessary: but humour he has of the highest quality. 'The Ordinary' is full of it; and Moth, the Antiquary, though too much of a lay figure, and depending for his amusingness on his quaint antiquated language, is such a sketch as Mr. Dickens need not have been ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... and happiness and prosperity followed. Later the King granted him a travelling stipend, of forty-five pounds a year, and travelling became his greatest pleasure. Andersen visited England two or three times, and reckoned Charles Dickens among his friends. He was the honoured guest of Kings and Princes, and the Royal Family of Denmark treated ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... it, I have been in the habit for a good many years of taking my wife and my prayer-book to the Episcopal Church on Christmas-day. Dickens converted me to its observance ten years or more ago. But none are so sound as those who are tinged with heresy. And am I not a "blue Presbyterian?" It would not do to lend my countenance too readily to indecorous invasions ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... said Nuttie. 'It is Lord Frederick Verisopht, and the bad gentlefolks in the pictures to the old numbers of Dickens that you have got, Miss Mary. Now, isn't he? Look! only ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... world asking who and what they were, and the story began to get itself known. The old editions, which had long slept unbound in reams upon the shelves, began to descend and clothe themselves in green and crimson. Mr. Dickens sent a summary of it round the households of England. Everybody began to talk of Reineke; and now, at any rate, we said to ourselves, we shall see whether we are alone in our liking—whether others share in this strange ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... to read," he thought,—"some nice dime novel like 'The Demon of the Danube.' That was splendid. I like it a good deal better than Dickens. It's ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... casts somewhat of a shadow over the sentiment; yet I feel constrained to quote it, as representing my own feelings in regard to the question whether the artistic temperament is a curse or a blessing. Shakespeare had it; Dickens had it; and Thackeray confessed that he would have been glad to black Shakespeare's boots. One may well be convinced that it is a blessing by the penalties which Heaven exacts from its possessors. It means the capacity ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... be blessed if I can see what in the dickens that revolver of Mainwaring's had to do with the ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... was 'touch and go' with us, and no mistake! Now, Professor, if you can make them understand you, just ask them what the dickens they mean by attacking white men in that gratuitous and light-hearted fashion; and then explain to them that we have no desire at all to do them the slightest harm if they will but behave civilly ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... all celebrated people who write books of travels begin by describing their days of sea-sickness. Dickens, George Combe, Fanny Kemble, Mrs. Stowe, Miss Bremer, and many others, have opened in like manner their valuable remarks on foreign countries. While intending to avail myself of their privilege and example, I would, nevertheless, suggest, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... are here to do something, to accomplish something. If we are only here to make speeches, and not to arrive at conclusions, our mission is useless. The greater portion of the debate hitherto has been made up of set speeches, all like the circumlocution office in one of Dickens' novels, showing "how not to do it." I am not in favor of pursuing this course any longer. Let us talk the subject over like business men, in a sensible way, and then come to a vote. I think we may do something which will prove effectual, and I hope we shall. My political opinions are well known. ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... habits. Fairyland was shut to the little ones, who were turned out of their own domain. It seems quite likely that this continued until the German maerchen (the literary products of Germany were much in favour at this period) reopened the wonderland of the other world about the time that Charles Dickens helped to throw the door still wider. Discovering that the child possessed the right to be amused, the imagination of poets and artists addressed itself at last to the most appreciative of all audiences, a world of newcomers, with insatiable ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... cannot recount the simplest incident in its essential points but, slaves to literalness, make themselves insufferable bores by entering upon every lane and by-path of circumstance that leads nowhere and matters not the least in their story. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Shakespeare, and many other writers have seized upon such characters and made use of them for their comic effect. James, in illustrating this mental type, has quoted the following from Miss ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... day the United States was visited by an extraordinary number of Europeans who forthwith wrote books descriptive of what they had seen. Two of the most interesting—although the least flattering—of these works are Charles Dickens's American Notes for General Circulation (1842, and many reprints) and Mrs. Frances E. Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). Two very readable and generally sympathetic English accounts are Frances A. Kemble's Journal, 1832-1833, ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... action of the story, we were permitted to see them at first only through a haze of sentimentality, so that, allowing for great advances in the art of novel writing between the time of Richardson and the time of Dickens, we still should find the astonishing characterizations of "Pamela" reflected in the impossible virtues and melodramatic vices ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... been wishing for a tame crow ever since reading Dickens' charming description of his pet raven. There were no ravens where we lived; but Brother Tom said crows were just as good, and could be taught ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... Grandfather broke in with a word; and then she snapped at him, got into her second wind and went off again. I didn't listen half the time. I just stood and watched her as you'd watch one of those weird old women in one of Dickens' books come to life. What I remember of it all is that I am deceitful and fast, ungrateful, irresponsible, with no sense of decency, and when at last she pronounced sentence, what do you think it was? Confinement to ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... astonishing how frequently Dickens' characters and descriptions come into the memory of a stranger visiting London. No one, who has ever seen them, will forget the houses in Chancery. Situated as some of them are, in the busiest and most crowded parts of the city, and mouldering away from disuse and neglect, the idea constantly ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... he sat beneath an oak An acorn fell abruptly And smote his nose: whereat he spoke Of acorns most corruptly. "Great Scott!" he cried. "The Dickens!" too, And other authors whom he knew, And having duly ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... firms of publishers who never advertise in any literary weekly or any daily, who never publish anything new, and who may possibly be unknown to Simpkins themselves. They issue badly printed, badly bound, showy editions of the eternal Scott and the eternal Dickens, in many glittering volumes with scores of bleared illustrations, and they will sell them up and down the provinces by means of respectably dressed "commission agents," at prices much in excess of their value, to an ingenuous, ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... to all your views both about Thackeray and Dickens, although you care for some of Thackeray of which I am not personally fond. Mother loves it all. Mother, by the way, has been reading "The Legend of Montrose" to the little boys and they are absorbed in it. She finds it hard to get anything that will appeal ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... a seductive occupation to delve into the lives of these bygone players, and there is always temptation to tarry long and lovingly amid such chequered careers. But, like poor Joe, of Dickens, we must keep moving on, and so leave Johnson and Baker for another actor who waits to strut across the stage of these "Palmy Days." Thomas Elrington is the new-comer; the same Elrington who sought to outshine ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... but I can't—my horse, as you see, having over eat himself, is struck with the founders and can't budge. I put him in 'Squire Dickens' stable, 'long with his animals, and seeing that he hadn't had much the day before, I emptied the corn from their troughs into his, and jest see what's come of it. I hadn't ought to done ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... thousands of men. And yet the only "I" in these men is your own "I." These characters in your mind move and live and have their being, and yet there is nothing in them except "You!" The characters of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, and the rest, were such strong Mental Images that not only their creators were carried away by their power, and apparent ability, but even you who read of them, many years after, perhaps, feel the apparent ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... deliberately ignore all the unconventional aspects of that passion, and you might read a thousand of their productions without suspecting, if you did not already know the fact, that it had any connexion with our physical nature. The men and women, youths and maidens, of Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot, to say nothing of minor writers, are true enough to nature in other respects, but in all sexual relations they are mere simulacri. George Meredith is our only novelist who triumphs in this region. As Mr. Lowell has noticed, there is a fine natural atmosphere of sex in ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... Quarry and Seacombe Cliff would be passed on the way; between the two are some old guns marking the spot where the East Indiaman Halsewell went down in a fearful storm in January, 1786. This tragedy was immortalized by Charles Dickens in "The Long Voyage." Out of 250 souls only eighty-two were saved by men employed at Winspit Quarry. Some of the passengers are buried in the level ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... woman, but our findings on tests and otherwise have been irregular and diverse. She reached 6th grade at 14 years, but had been absent much on account of sickness. When first seen we found that she was already fond of Lytton, Scott, and Dickens, and that she was a great reader of the daily newspapers, dwelling much on accidents and tragedies. What we say about her ability must be based upon the best that she has demonstrated. Often when seen she has been in some mental state which has prevented ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... society: the nobility and the landed gentry (wealthy or impoverished), and a few well-to-do merchants—people several strata above the social levels of the characters popularized by his contemporary Dickens. Most of Trollope's early novels were set in the countryside or in provincial towns, with occasional forays into London. The first of his political novels, Can You Forgive Her, dealing with the Pallisers was published in 1864, two years before ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... currents of opinion, for which prejudice is perhaps too narrow a name, which flow so imperceptibly through the minds of a generation or a whole century that there is little realization of their novelty. Such a slow-moving current was the humanitarianism which found such vigorous expression in Dickens, the belief in industrial democracy which is being picked up as a theme by novelist after novelist to-day, or the sense of the value of personality and human experience which so intensely characterizes the literature of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... say to Mr. Dickens, after sitting on the esplanade for fifteen minutes. And again, "That'll do, thank you, Mr. Dickens." At the first command he would seek the sun; at the second he would stay the chair ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... is no surer indication of shallowness than the desire to read only about pleasant subjects and characters and events. It is akin to the habit of ignoring the existence of everything disagreeable in life, which Dickens has satirized in his character, Mr. Podsnap. And "Podsnappery" exists among women even more than among men, because of their more sensitive emotional nature. If women are to join with men in making the world better, they must not blink at the misery and vice ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... behind those smug, well-fitting doors. But they have been mere glimpses, incoherent, obscure, often imaginative, or guesswork based on scanty, incorrect, at any rate secondhand information; never yet conclusive and complete. In England, Charles Dickens and Charles Reade have personally visited prisons, talked with prisoners, written stories that have stirred the world, and forced improvements. Great prisoners like Kropotkin have related their experiences in Russia, and our own George ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... am very sorry to hear that you have been more troubled than usual with your old complaint. Any one who looked at you would think that you had passed through life with few evils, and yet you have had an unusual amount of suffering. As a turnkey remarked in one of Dickens' novels, "Life is a rum thing." (782/1. This we take to be an incorrect version of Mr. Roker's remark (in reference to Tom Martin, the Butcher), "What a rum thing Time is, ain't it, Neddy?" ("Pickwick," Chapter XLII.). A careful student ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... twelve children of a hard-pressed Dr. Partridge out of which is chosen a little girl to be adopted by a spoiled, fine lady. We have rarely read a story for boys and girls with greater pleasure. One of the chief characters would not have disgraced Dickens' ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... like Chesterton's paper, the New Witness [wrote an American journalist in the New York Tribune (no, not yet Herald-Tribune)], since G.K.C. has taken it over. . . . Gilbert Chesterton seems to me the best thing England has produced since Dickens. . . . I like the things he believes in, and I hate sociological experts and prohibitionists and Uhlan officers, which are the things he hates. I feel in him that a very honest man is speaking. . . . I like his impudence ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... master's heart. One evening he was so busy reading that he did not notice her when she jumped into his lap. Pussy's feelings were hurt. She purred gently, but the reader did not seem to hear. Suddenly the candle went out. Dickens lighted it again to go on with his reading. In a minute the light grew dim again, and, looking up, he saw the cat putting out the candle with her paw. Then she looked at him in such a pleading way that he laid down his book for the rest of ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... They were glad when it was over. Lawton, the bookseller and his wife, came and were persuaded to remain and dine. Caroline liked them at sight. The most impressive call, however, was that of Mr. and Mrs. "C." Dickens. The great man made it a point to dress in the style of bygone years, and his conversation was a treat. His literary labors were fatiguing and confining, he admitted, and the "little breath of rural ozone" ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... satire to halt on, both in Greek and English—which I read about twenty years ago, and with the point of which I was much tickled. Poetasters were laughed at; but Mr. Slum, whom I employed—Mr. Charles Dickens obliged me with his address—converted the idea into that of a hit at mathematicasters, as easily as he turned the Warren acrostic into Jarley. As he observed, when I settled his little account, it is cheaper than any prose, though the broom was not ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... his head. "Not them—I knew about them! But Dunn and Collins cleared out the day you left, and I thought——" he broke off irrelevantly. "What the dickens possessed you to take Paulette with you that night? She might have been killed—I heard you'd the dog's own trouble on ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... to be able to read Shakespeare," Petroff said. "I have heard his works spoken of in such high terms by some of our friends who have studied your language, and I have heard, too, from them of your Dickens. They tell me it is like reading of another world—a world in which there are no officials, and no police, and no soldiers. That must be very ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... 'curses not loud, but deep.' Deep or loud, no purpose would they have answered; the waggoner's temper was proof against curse in or out of the English language; and from their snail's pace neither DICKENS nor devil, nor any postillion in England, could make him put his horses. Lord Colambre jumped out of the chaise, and, walking beside him, began to talk to him; and spoke of his horses, their bells, their trappings; ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... charitable, was glad to report to Forster some hearty praise by this person, of the ability with which he (Forster) had arranged the matters, thus amiably wishing to propitiate the autocrat in his friend's interest. But, said the uncompromising Forster, "I am truly sorry, my dear Dickens, that I cannot reciprocate your friend's compliment, for a d——nder ass I never encountered in the whole course of my life!" A comparative that is novel ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... After calling upon an expectant mother who showed me her layette, all white and blue, I dream that I go in an old house to a room with blue papered walls, a blue and white spread on the bed and a case of books, one of which is Dickens' Great Expectations. In one old house I find the bulbs of some plant sprouting on a shelf; in another I open the stove and find to my surprise that fire is still there. In still another house I see behind the stove a closed door which I long to open. I go ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... with his mouth open, staring at the large, neat, unruffled bed. What the dickens could the mater be up to? She must, of course, be sitting up in her small sitting-room next door to the bedroom. Evidently the heat ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... be independent of the public for which they write. There is nothing the public will be more apt to understand and appreciate quickly than a passing reference to the English Bible. So it comes about that when Dickens is describing the injustice of the Murdstones to little David Copperfield, he can put the whole matter before us in a parenthesis: "Though there was One once who set a child in the midst of the disciples." Dickens knew ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... DICKENS, CHARLES Barnaby Rudge Bleak House David Copperfield Dombey and Son Great Expectations Hard Times Little Dorrit Martin Chuzzlewit Nicholas Nickleby Oliver Twist Old Curiosity Shop Our Mutual Friend Pickwick Papers Tale ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Strome" was published as a serial in All the Year Round. Charley Dickens, the son of the great novelist, and editor of the magazine, used to say to me while the story was in progress, "Keep that red-haired girl up to the mark, and the story will do." I took a fancy to Mary Dene myself. ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... each other, as if still in friendly recognition; but the sombre reflections of Dashall and his friend were broke in upon by a countryman with, "Beant that Measter Fox, zur?" "His effigy, my 17friend." "Aye, aye, but what the dickens ha've they wrapt ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... that of which the speaker says something. The terms in which he says it,—the predicate,—he, of course, assumes that the hearer already understands. Settle, then, which—plant or ivy—Dickens supposed the reader to know least about, and which, therefore, Dickens was telling him about; and you settle which word—plant or ivy—is the subject. (Is it not the writer's poetical conception of "the green ivy" that the reader is supposed not ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... a dickens is the Woman always a whimpring about Murder for? No Gentleman is ever look'd upon the worse for killing a Man in his own Defence; and if Business cannot be carried on without it, what would you have a ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... however, he fairly screamed at the public from the advertisement columns of "The Referee": "Mackwayte, in his Celebrated Kerbstone Sketches. Wit! Pathos! Tragedy!!! The Epitome of London Life. Universally Acclaimed as the Greatest Portrayer of London Characters since the late Chas. Dickens. In Tremendous Demand for Public Dinners. The Popular Favorite. A Few Dates still Vacant. 23, Laleham Villas, Seven Kings. ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... unsympathetic and stubborn ear. He was coming to believe very strongly that all this fanciful optimism was so much laughing-gas, with only a passing power, and when the effect wore off there would be the Dickens to pay. He did not want to see Margaret MacLean turn into a bitter-minded woman of the world—stripped of her trust and her dreams. He—all of them—had need of her as she was. Her belief in the ultimate good of things and ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... she had opened was a volume of Dickens' Christmas stories, and in three minutes she was carried away from the little town of Fairfax to the heart of old London, and from the warmth of spring to the bitterness of winter, as she listened with Toby Veck to the music of the chimes that rang ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... Officer," I told him. I had just recalled my dinner, now utterly ruined, and Dunny, probably at this instant cracking walnuts as fiercely as if each one were the kaiser's head. "But I'm an amateur in these affairs, and you are a master. Before I go, as man to man, what the dickens do you make ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... volumes has been undertaken with the view of supplying the want of a class of books for children, of a vigorous, manly tone, combined with a plain and concise mode of narration. The writings of Charles Dickens have been selected as the basis of the scheme, on account of the well-known excellence of his portrayal of children, and the interests connected with children—qualities which have given his volumes their strongest hold on the hearts of parents. These delineations having thus ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... of Cambridge, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Earl Russell and the Earl of Derby. In 1867 and in 1870 he also spoke and on the latter occasion the speakers included Mr. J. Lothrop Motley, the American Minister, and Charles Dickens. At the banquet in 1871 the Prince spoke and at that of 1874 he drew special attention to the picture, "Calling the Roll," which afterwards made Miss Elizabeth Thompson so famous, and to a ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... actuality. When this is the case, illusions of memory may arise at once just as in the case of dreams. This will happen more easily when the imagination has for some time been occupied with the same group of ideal scenes, persons, or events. To Dickens, as is well known, his fictitious characters were for the time realities, and after he had finished his story their forms and their doings lingered with him, assuming the aspect of personal recollections. So, too, the energetic ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... plot and incident are attractively arranged, the expression of life for the most part second-hand and artificial. There are traces of Dickens' burlesque without his sympathy, and the high colouring of Lytton with less than Lytton's wit. Disraeli's satire, too, is echoed in the political scenes. The young Australian squatter, whose experiences ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... a paper recently published by Mr. Dickens in his "Household Words," will convey to the reader some idea of an eviction, that may be taken as a specimen, and perhaps a fair one, of the fifty thousand evictions that took place in the single year 1849, and of the hundreds of thousands ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... Indians in white men's clothing, negroes (black and brown), and tall, blonde Tennessee mountaineers made up this amazing population—a population in which libraries were of small value, a tobacco-chewing, ceaselessly spitting unkempt horde, whose stage of culture was almost precisely that which Dickens and other travelers from the old world had found in the Central West ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... irrespective of mere party grounds. Its Essays, Poems, and Tales will be furnished by the ablest writers of both Continents. A new Novel, by Mr. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, entitled "QUITE ALONE," will, by special arrangement with the Author, appear in the WEEKLY simultaneously with its publication in Mr. DICKENS'S "All the Year Round." The Publishers will see to it that the current Volume shall justify the favorable opinions expressed by the loyal Press upon the ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... ought to remember, DICKENS'S "Brothers Cheeryble." Well, Benjamin Goldfinch has all the milk of human kindness which characterised these philanthropic Gemini. As to moral characteristics, he is these two single gentlemen rolled into one, while physically, ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... is careful to mingle solid instruction with entertainment; and the humorous touches, especially in the sketch of John Holl, the Westminster dustman, Dickens himself could ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... I. "How the dickens do you expect to sail a boat like that off here in the woods, where there isn't enough ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... imagination was sinful. I once heard a professor of this creed express the doubt whether Shakespeare had not, on the whole, done much more harm than good, and state that he himself would not allow the works of Dickens to occupy a place in a hospital library, from which, as a matter of fact—for on this point the discussion had arisen—they had been excluded by the then chaplain of the institution, a man of like views. In fact, the idea of God which was presented ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... C. Stevenson, was born in Chelsea, London, Sept. 29, 1810. She married a Unitarian clergyman in Manchester. Her first literary work was published anonymously, and met with a storm of mingled approval and disapproval. Charles Dickens invited her to contribute to his "Household Words," and it was in the pages of that famous periodical, at intervals between December 13, 1851, and May 21, 1853, that her charming sketches of social life in a little country town first appeared. In June, 1853, they were ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... take me half a minute; and the money was in my pocket, and the letter was empty! But now, look here!—I never meant to steal the note. I am not a Newgate thief, yet. I was in an uncommon fix just then, over a certain affair; and if I could not stop the fellow's mouth, there'd have been the dickens to pay. So I took the money for that stop-gap, never intending to do otherwise than replace it in Galloway's desk as soon as I could get it. I knew I should be having some from Lord Carrick. It was all Lady Augusta's fault. ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Miss Toland talking, Julia a passionately interested listener. Perhaps the older woman would read some passage from Meredith or de Balzac, after which Julia dipped into Meredith for herself, but found him slow, and plunged back into Dickens and Thackeray. It amused Miss Toland to watch her read, to have Julia burst ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... friends, is not a thing to laugh at, but a thing to weep at; and your English humorists have not yet learned, when they must laugh at vice and sin, to laugh at it with a heart full of woe. Swift is steeped in vinegar; Fielding's humor is oiled and sugar-coated; Dickens can never laugh unless with convulsive explosion; Thackeray sneers, and George Eliot is almost malicious with her humor; and the only man in English literature who is sick at heart while he laughs is not even counted among the humorists,—Carlyle. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... transformed the knowledge of the Elizabethan theater and has brought to light important new facts relating to the drama and to Shakespeare. The new social spirit has changed the critical viewpoint concerning authors as different as Wordsworth, Keats, Ruskin, Dickens, and Tennyson. Wordsworth's treatment of childhood, for instance, now requires an amount of space that would a short time ago have seemed disproportionate. Later Victorian writers, like Meredith, Hardy, Swinburne, and Kipling, can no longer be accorded the usual brief perfunctory ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... keep from untwisting the morning-glory, only be willing to let the sunshine do it! Dickens said real children went out with powder and top-boots; and yet the children of Dickens's time were simple buds compared with the full-blown miracles of conventionality and erudition ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... passant [Fr.], by the way, incidentally; as it may happen; at random, at a venture, at haphazard. Phr. acierta errando [Lat.]; dextro tempore [Lat.]; fearful concatenation of circumstances [D. Webster]; fortuitous combination of circumstances [Dickens]; le jeu est le fils d'avarice et le pere du desespoir [Fr.]; the happy combination of fortuitous circumstances [Scott]; the fortuitous or casual concourse of atoms [Bentley]; God does not play dice with ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to the hundred square miles—with uninhabited regions around. Of course we had no libraries, magazines, or newspapers out there. Indeed we had almost no books at all, only a stray file or two of American newspapers, one of which made me acquainted with some of the works of Dickens and of Lever. While in those northern wilds I also met—as with dear old friends—some stray copies of Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, and ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... absence of testimony to the belief that Bacon wrote them is strong evidence that such belief did not exist until recently, a fact that tends to discredit the Baconian theory of authorship. The fact that in the writings of Dickens and Thackeray no mention is made of the bicycle is negative evidence that the bicycle had not then come into use. That Moses nowhere in his writings speaks of life after death is negative evidence that the Hebrews did not believe in ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... hipped, tired, worried, and annoyed about something. They wore their hats at an angle then unfamiliar to me, with a forward rake. They must laugh or, at any rate, smile sometimes, I thought. This is where Punch comes from. It is the land of Dickens. It is, in short, Merry England. But, as I regarded the dingy, set faces from the railway's carriage window, it seemed inconceivable that their owners ever could have laughed, or screwed up the skin around their eyes to look out happily ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... say!"—halting suddenly before a long, narrow case with a glass front, which stood on end in a far corner, and, being lined with black velvet, brought into ghastly prominence the suspended shape of a human skeleton contained within—"I say! What the dickens is this? Looks like a doctor's specimen, b'gad. You haven't let anybody—I mean, you haven't been buying any prehistoric bones, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... If Dickens's illustrious statistician, Mr. Gradgrind, were in the flesh to-day, how he would gloat over this book! The 'facts' presented in its seven hundred double-columned pages would satisfy, even to repletion, his voracious cravings; and once crammed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... reached this haven was a question, since it was the only book in the house except a Big Creek bible, as the catalogue of a mail-order house is called in that country. Beaudry resented the frank, insolent observations of Dickens on the manners of Americans. In the first place, the types were not true to life. ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... he is not. Our brutal commercialism has been a temporary aberration; the quintessential Englishman is not the hero of Smiles' 'Self-help'; he is Raleigh, Drake, Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, or Wordsworth, with a pleasant spice of Dickens. He is, in a word, an idealist who has not quite forgotten that he is descended from an independent race of sea-rovers, accustomed to think and act for themselves. Mr. Havelock Ellis, one of the wisest and most fearless of our prophets to-day, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... than half a century. He died so recently as 1851, at the advanced age of ninety-two. Robert Chambers has described him as a most honourable man, of singularly amiable character and cheerful manners. It may interest some people to know that his granddaughter was the wife of Dickens, the famous novelist. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... other great tongue of those days. It ceased long ago. Look at the Indian language. It is ceasing. The language of Wales, of Ireland, of the Scottish Highlands is dying before our eyes. The most popular book in the English tongue at the present time, except the bible, is one of Dickens' works, his "Pickwick Papers." It is largely written in the language of London street-life; and experts assure us that in fifty years it will be unintelligible to ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... Italy; but mind To leave the pale low France behind; Pass through that country, nor ascend The Rhine, nor over Tyrol wend: Thus all at once shall rise more grand The glories of the ancient land. Dickens! how often, when the air Breath'd genially, I've thought me there, And rais'd to heaven my thankful eyes To see three spans of deep blue skies. In Genoa now I hear a stir, A shout ... Here comes the Minister! Yes, thou ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... Leah Delmotte Delorme, Marian Desmarets, Henri Despres, Josquin Devrient, Wilhelmine Schroeder Dickens, Charles Diderot, Denis Diehl, Alice Mangold Dies, Albert K. Droszdick, Baron von Dubufe, Edward Dubufe, Guillaume "Duchess," The Dudevant, Aurore (see Sand, George) Du Maurier, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... Where the dickens were my evening things? I had looked all over the place before I remembered that Jeeves must have taken them away to brush. To leap at the bell and ring it was, with me, the work of a moment. I had just rung it when there ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... "Where the dickens is she!" he continued. "Lizzy! Georgy! (calling to his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... call a sport, too, in a way, and how he ever took up with me I never could understand. I hadn't any money—I had to work like the dickens to get along. All my people are dead, and I was then, as I am now, practically alone in the world. But this fellow, who came of a good family, took me up, and we formed a ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... off in Mother Goose's train, which had lingered on the steps to see the Dickens reception, with which the procession of characters in costume had closed. At this moment they were dancing round the barberry bush, in a corner of the balcony in Mother Goose's quarters, their feather-dusters ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... had ruled a large part of the Indian Empire, but he was in the habit of saying that he had rather have written the works of Dickens. The table now took possession of a subject much to its liking. Aunt Eleanor showed premonitory signs of pronouncing an opinion. Although she had blunted her taste upon some form of philanthropy for ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... suffice for the time. And of our own Christmas so much has been said and sung by better voices, that we may leave it to the feelings and the memories of those who read the fireside tales of Dickens, and are happy in their homes. The many elements which I have endeavoured to recall, mix all of them in the Christmas of the present, partly, no doubt, under the form of vague and obscure sentiment; partly ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... by no means Leigh Hunt's strong point. In this respect, but not otherwise, he may have suggested Skimpole to Charles Dickens. On one of my visits I found him trying to puzzle out the abstruse question of how he should deduct some such sum as thirteen shillings and ninepence from a sovereign. On another occasion I had to pay him a sum of money, L100 or L200, and I wrote him a check for ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... stories (is it Dickens?) has given us very wrong ideas of the English lodging-house. What good American does not go into London with the distinct impression that, whatever else he does or does not do, he will upon no ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Square. Apparently at this time he made an unsuccessful attempt to return to active service. He was meanwhile working hard at Poor Jack, Masterman Ready, The Poacher, Percival Keene, etc., and living hard in the merry circle of a literary Bohemia, with Clarkson Stanfield, Rogers, Dickens, and Forster; to whom were sometimes added Lady Blessington, Ainsworth, Cruickshank, and Lytton. The rival interests served to sour his spirits and weaken ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... "Nay, the dickens!" said another; "Giles Chatburn's ale would warm the seat of old cloven-foot himsel';" and with that there were roars of laughing, in which, however, the stranger did not participate. Mike wondered ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... feeds upon research and comparison, which considers a new date or the emendation of a mispunctuated line of verse, worthy of effort, knows not Chesterton. He is the student of the big men. He has written books about Dickens, Browning, and Shaw, of whom only one common quality can be noted, which is that they are each the subjects of at least twenty other books. To write about the things which have already yielded ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... Taunton, he with the leonine mane, who spared her none of his forensic eloquence, but found Patricia less tractable than the most stubborn of juries. Bluff Walter Thurman, too, who was said to know more of Dickens, whist and criminal law than any other man living, came to worship at her shrine, as likewise did huge red-faced Ashby Bland, famed for that cavalry charge which history-books tell you that he led, and ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... that nothing in his exterior revealed the astute statesman; that, on the contrary, he looked very much as one might imagine Dickens's Mr. Pickwick to look; and she confesses that at the first glance he reminded her more of an English red-complexioned country squire, who rides and hunts, eats good dinners, and takes life lightly, than of a profound and ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... letters in the early 'Forties broke down many barriers of language; the new things that had to be said demanded new ways of saying them; homely, grotesque, or sordid life was rendered in sordid, grotesque, and homely terms. Pickwick in 1837 had established the immense vogue of Dickens, the Heroes in 1840 had assured the imposing prestige of Carlyle; and the example of both made for the freest and boldest use of language. Across the Channel the stupendous fabric of the Comedie Humaine was approaching completion, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... into German, but reprinted at Leipzig in the original; and it is said to have had a larger sale in Germany than the work of any German historian. Baron Humboldt and Baron Bunsen address their writings to the English as much as to the German public. The novels of Dickens and Thackeray are expected with the same impatience at Leipzig and Berlin as in London. The two great German classics, Schiller and Goethe, have found their most successful biographers in Carlyle and Lewes; and several works of German scholarship have met with more attentive ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... few days before Christmas you should read Dickens's A Christmas Carol. It is one of the best, if not the best, Christmas story ever written. How does Dickens make you feel while you read this selection? How many people are present at the Cratchits'? To whom ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... Works of fiction have furnished the language with epithets for types of individuals (sec. 622). Don Quixote, Faust, Punch, Reinecke Fuchs, Br'er Rabbit, Falstaff, Bottom, and many from Dickens (Pickwick, Pecksniff, Podsnap, Turveydrop, Uriah Heep) are examples. The words are like coins. They condense ideas and produce classes. They economize language. They also produce summary criticisms ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... anything he could not do? He mimicked birds and animals; he imitated a wheezy phonograph playing "When We Were a Couple of Kids"; he recited "The Raven" and "Paul Revere's Ride"; he gave a cutting from Dickens and one from Sheridan Knowles; he showed how Joe Jefferson played Rip Van Winkle, how Sol Smith Russell did "A ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... right," mumbled Pap. "Got the whole house uptore, and Laurelly miscallin' me till I don't know which way to look; and now the little dickens is a-goin' to git well all right. Chaps is tough, I tell ye. Ye cain't ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... even of you, and may very likely win the honours which would be yours, had you the boldness which fortune delights to favour. If you think me too sanguine, you can possibly obtain an interview with Mr Dickens, and qualify my representations by the discouraging views he will give you. They say here, that he came out to America on purpose to dun brother Jonathan, and it is still spoken of with surprise, that though shrewdly invited to dinner, he was not deterred from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... age was seen to enter Westminster Abbey shortly before evening prayers. Going straight up the main aisle he stopped at the tomb of Charles Dickens. Then, looking to see that he was not observed, he kneeled before the tombstone, and tenderly placed upon it a bunch of violets. The little fellow hovered affectionately round the spot for a few moments and went away with a happy, ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... comprised many examples of eccentric characters, rarely found outside of the pages of Dickens; the majority, however, were very interesting and refined people, and the exceptional types only served to accentuate the desirability and variety of their companionship on a voyage of this character. Here is a description of some of them, exaggerated perhaps ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... later; infant and Girl of Two asleep; house in order; lunch and dinner arranged; buttons sewed on Girl of Eight's boots, string on Girl of Ten's hood, and both dispatched to school, etc. Enter Mrs. A. Draws a long sigh of relief and seats herself at desk. Reads a page of Dickens and a poem or two to attune herself for work. Seizes pen, scribbles erratically a few ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... read their Dickens, as all men who are privileged to speak the English language ought to do, will remember a striking little passage in 'Oliver Twist,' in which the author moralises upon the first dressing of a new-born pauper baby. Until the faded yellow garments ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed in due course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and Pearsall Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in Town" will delight the lover of the greatest of all cities. But urban wanderings, delicious as they are, are not quite what we mean ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... phrase!) Nineteenth Century." The Rev. THOMAS hath well and ably done his work, and therefore doth the Baron advise his readers to go to their booksellers, and, being there, to imitate the example of DICKENS's oft-quoted Oliver, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various |
