TODAY IS the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth, so brace for it. One blogger’s candle is the republication of annotations Dickens’s friend, Wilkie Collins, wrote in the pages of The Life of Charles Dickens, by John Forster, yet another friend of Dickens’s–and certainly one more generous with his praise.
.
By PAUL LEWIS [Paul Lewis Money] – [Wilkie] Collins never did put Dickens in the top echelon of novelists. That honour he reserved for James Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott, and Honoré de Balzac whom in 1883 and 1884 he called ‘the three Kings of Fiction’ and of those Walter Scott was ‘King, Emperor, President, and God Almighty of novelists’.2His annotations then turn to individual Dickens books.
Oliver Twist – ‘the one defect in that wonderful book is the helplessly bad construction of the story. The character of “Nancy” is the finest thing he ever did. He never afterwards saw all the sides of a woman’s character – saw all round her. That the same man who could create “Nancy” created the second Mrs Dombey is the most incomprehensible anomaly that I know of in literature.’
Barnaby Rudge – ‘…the weakest book that Dickens ever wrote.’
Martin Chuzzlewit – ‘Chuzzlewit (in some respects the finest novel he ever wrote) delighted his readers and so led to a large sale of the next book, Dombey.’
Dombey and Son – ‘…the latter half of Dombey no intelligent person can have read without astonishment at the badness of it.’
.
Continued at Paul Lewis Money |More Chronicle & Notices.
.
Also in the Fortnightly: Charles Dickens in the Editor’s Chair by Percy Fitzgerald.
.
And what Dickens had to say about others, in the University of Buckingham’s Dickens Journals Online project: DJO Conference: Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press
fail…..