"Dickens" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he only expresses himself. Each selects his own method. The school of Meissonier is not content with a few grand truths simply expressed. They want a multitude of facts; they must tell the story in their own way. They are the Dickens and Walter Scott of art. It is iteration and reiteration. My cardinal must not only have red stockings, says Vibert, but they must be silk; every detail must be elaborated. Very well, what of it? you say. What do ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... round when I did, Dick,' he said at last, 'and saw you making the "danger-look-out-sharp" signal. I couldn't think what the dickens it was. I was so cocksure of catching the mare in half-a-mile farther that I couldn't help wondering what it was all about. Anyhow, I knew we agreed it was never to be worked for nothing, so thought the best thing I could do was to call in the mare, and see if I could find out anything then. When ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... 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 ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... work that Mr. DICKENS were to send to the London press he should find occasion to indulge in ridicule against alleged American peculiarities, or broad caricatures of our actual vanities, or other follies, we could with the utmost cheerfulness pass them by unnoted and uncondemned, if he would only now and then ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... St. New York. Lovell has been described as a book pirate who tried to form a monopoly in the cheap uncopyrighted book trade. The US copyright laws were rather weak in the nineteenth century, and Charles Dickens was particularly hurt by pirates. There was even a book war, with rival publishers of the same book undercutting each other on price. Proof reading was done with another copy of the book published in ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... 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. But I uniformly prefer my heroines to my heroes; perhaps because ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... Sir Edward Bulwer, and even refused to admit that James Fenimore Cooper was the greatest novelist that ever lived. But these things were as nothing compared with his unpatriotic defence of Charles Dickens. Many Americans had fallen into a great rage over the vivacious assault upon the United States in "Martin Chuzzlewit;" nevertheless, Crailey still boldly hailed him (as everyone had heretofore agreed) the most dexterous writer of his day and the most notable ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... "What the dickens is the matter with me?" he said to himself, as for the sixteenth time he brushed his rebellious locks. "What has come over my hair? And what under the sun am I afraid of? The idea of a man of my size looking under the bed every night ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... a poss'bil'ty that you'll wefwain fum spillin' out fum yeh till the negs cawneh. Thass the manneh of those who ah not acquainted with the pee-ogue. 'Lost to sight, to memo'y deah'—if you'll egscuse the maxim. Thass Chawles Dickens mague ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... good things have been nourished in the child's heart by this powerful aid. It has greatly helped to keep us ever young, by preserving through our worldly ways one slender track, not overgrown with weeds, where we may walk with children, sharing their delights. DICKENS. ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... had lost a leg or an arm, and who must lie in one position for weeks. To help them get through the time was to help them to live. I therefore made the library rich in popular fiction and genial books of travel and biography. Full sets of Irving, Cooper, Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, Marryat, and other standard works were bought; and many a time I have seen a poor fellow absorbed in their pages while holding his stump lest the jar of a footstep should send a dart of agony to the point ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... Chicago He was a graceful child, Those sacred chickens Just raised the dickens The Vestal Virgins went wild. Whenever the Nervii got nervy He gave them an awful razz They shook is their shoes With the Consular blues The ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the dates agree. Dickens, most typical of all early Victorians, died in 1870. George Eliot's last great novel, Daniel Deronda, was published in 1876. Victor Hugo's greatest poem, La Legende des Siecles, the imaginative synthesis of all the ages, appeared in the 'seventies. There have been many writers ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... a novel, and there are no bad ones in the world, except those you do not happen to like. Suppose a boy started with Robinson Crusoe and was scientifically and criminally steered by the hand of misguided "culture" to Scott and Dickens and Cooper and Hawthorne—all the classics, in fact, so that he would escape the vulgar thousands? Answer a straight question, ye old rooters between a thousand miles of muslin lids—would you have been willing to miss "The ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... said, "and a happy Christmas, and I hope it's not too much to ask of you that on this relation-infested day one's feelings may be harrowed by you as little as possible. And why the deu—dickens they think it necessary to wash the hall floor before breakfast, ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... handkerchiefs, with the initials of his name beautifully worked in a corner of each. This had been done by Anna, who was very skilful in such dainty arts. The other package consisted of a complete set of Dickens's works, in strong, plain, but very ...
— The Two Story Mittens and the Little Play Mittens - Being the Fourth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... talent, for story-telling.... That he should have a large circle of readers in England and this country, where so many are trying to tell stories with no stories to tell, is a healthy sign, in that it shows that the love of fiction, pure and simple, is as strong as it was in the days of Dickens and Thackeray and Scott, the older days of Smollett and Fielding, and the old, old days of Le Sage and Cervantes.—N. ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... duodecimo volume of poems and songs, entitled "Rambling Rhymes." This publication attracted considerable attention, and secured for the author the personal favour of Lord Jeffrey. He also received the commendation of Thomas Campbell, Charles Dickens, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Mackay, and other literary and poetical celebrities. A new and enlarged edition of his volume appeared in 1845, and was dedicated by permission to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Humphry Ward. The criticism which 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 such a huge crop of criticism ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... people, as a 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
... 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
... a kind, motherly woman, she might have done much to reconcile the boy to his new home; but she was a tall, gaunt, bony woman, more masculine than feminine, not unlike Miss Sally Brass, whom all readers of Dickens will remember. ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... smell of horse or saddle or bridle could we find in the dark. After a while, daylight came, and I caught sight of the wool, and tumbled to the little game. Of course, I ripped across to give the fellows the office, praying and cursing fit to break my neck. What the dickens induced them to run the risk of duffing here? Maddest thing I ever knew. Martin has been living here since this day week; and his greatest pleasure in life is prowling round when he ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... immediate departure for town to-morrow.—And now, dear, don't stay to argue; because I have said exactly all there is to say on the subject, and a little more. And try to toddle to bed without telling me of which cute character in Dickens I remind you, because I am cuter than any of them, and if I stay in this tight frock another second I can't answer for the consequences.—Oui, Josephine, entrez!—Good-night, dear aunt. ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... the power of Balzac—he took in more than this one field. This was the universal appeal of Dickens; he wrote of people, all kinds of people, doing all kinds of things. As you recall with pleasure some preferred novel of this general favorite, you find yourself looking narrowly for the "love story" in it. It is there—for it is part of life; but it does not dominate the ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... welkin with a knife at my place sometimes when me and my missus get our tails up; and we're fearful pals. Daresay I just took 'em on an off day. But that was my impression though—that she wasn't just the sort of woman for old Sabre. But after all, what the dickens sort of woman would be? Fiddling chap for a husband, old Puzzlehead. Can imagine him riling any wife with wrinkling up his nut over some plain as a pikestaff thing and saying, 'Well, I don't quite see that.' Ha! Rum chap. Nice chap. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... I had something 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
... Dick, breaking again into astonishing Spanish for the benefit of the official. "Well, if you really don't mind, as I'm in the dickens of a hurry. You can follow by train, you know, as soon as you've proved to these blunderers that you're ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the dickens ails thee, Rover?" said he, rising and following him to the door to learn the cause of his alarm. "What! be they gone again, ey?" for the dog was silent. "What do thee sniffle at, boy? On'y look at 'un ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... President's message, substantially. He goes on to represent this as a great and powerful country, and that no State has a right to secede from it; but the power of the country, if I understand the President, consists in what Dickens makes the English constitution to be—a power to do nothing ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... Now Dickens—most extraordinary—dealt In fiction with what people really felt. That proves his genius. Thackeray again Is so unequal as to cause me pain. And last of all, with History to conclude, I've read Macaulay and I've heard of Froude. That list, with all deductions, Gentlemen, Will show ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... whispered, 'Mamma's own good boy.' Willie tripped lightly down the stairs and into the garden, where three little boys, of the respective ages of eight, six, and five, were playing at the well-known game which Charles Dickens terms 'an invasion of the imaginary domains ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford
... of story-books do you read, then?" they demanded. To which I replied with the names of a dozen or more of the simple, every-day classics that the school-boy and-girl are supposed to have read. They had never heard of "David Copperfield" or of Dickens. Nor had they ever heard of "Gulliver's Travels," nor of "The Vicar of Wakefield." They had heard the name "Robinson Crusoe," but they did not know it was the name of an entrancing romance. "Little Women," ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... others choose the name of a well-known person, public or private, the letters of whose name are the same in number as the players left in the room. Thus, supposing there are seven persons in the room, the name might be Dickens. The letters are then distributed; each player, as soon as he knows which letter is his, selecting some well-known living or historical character beginning with the same letter, whom he has to describe or personate. To personate is more fun than to describe. The players seat themselves ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... even a young girl. Immature indeed she is, but it is with the immaturity which will not develop, which has nothing to do with length of years. To me, the failure here is absolute; she never comes to life. Every student of Browning knows of the enthusiasm which Dickens expressed for this piece and ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... the minor poet was, in the eyes of most Englishmen, an object of ridicule. Dickens and Thackeray had done their worst with him: we knew him—or her—as Augustus Snodgrass or Blanche Amory—an amiable fool or an unamiable minx. The twentieth century has already, in its short course, done much to remove this prejudice, ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... their vividness and apparent 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 activity of imagination which ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... Mr. Holland's last evening, a gentleman, in instance of Charles Dickens's unweariability, said that during some theatrical performances in Liverpool he acted in play and farce, spent the rest of the night making speeches, feasting, and drinking at table, and ended at seven o'clock in the morning ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... manners, dresses, opinions, politics, actions, history, it is impossible to preserve a grave countenance; instead of having Carlyle to write a History of the French Revolution, I often think it should be handed over to Dickens or Theodore Hook: and oh! where is the Rabelais to be the faithful historian of the last phase of the Revolution—the last glorious nine years of which we are now commemorating the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... had a special pity for that class of philanthropists who cannot find a laugh in the midst of the miseries they would alleviate. A laugh rested him, and any teller of good stories, any writer of lively adventures, received a hearty greeting from him. He told Dickens that his "Pickwick Papers" had for years been his remedy for insomnia, and Sam Weller had helped him to many an hour of rested nerves. He loved and admired Longfellow and Lowell, and they were his most cherished friends, but the lively wit of Holmes had a special charm ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... of 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.
... research has 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 treatment. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Joseph Andrews— though of an entirely different type—is Lady Booby's "Waiting- Gentlewoman," the excellent Mrs. Slipslop. Her sensitive dignity, her easy changes from servility to insolence, her sensuality, her inimitably distorted vocabulary, which Sheridan borrowed for Mrs. Malaprop, and Dickens modified for Mrs. Gamp, are all peculiarities which make up a personification of the richest humour and the most life-like reality. Mr. Peter Pounce, too, with his "scoundrel maxims," as disclosed in that remarkable dialogue ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... 'come on,' but what the dickens do I do with my left leg while I'm turning and sliding with my right?" demanded another voice in a ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... 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 was a footstep outside, and ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 the amount. 'Well,' ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... we suspect, are greatest in France. In Germany, England and the United States they are about the same. Cooper, Irving and Prescott, in this country, have each received for copyrights more than one hundred thousand dollars. In England, Dickens has probably received more than any other living author—and in France Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Scribe, Thiers, and many others, have obtained large fortunes by writing. In Germany Dieffenbach received for his book on Operative Surgery some $3,500; and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... that the family doctor felt a great deal of concern about his symptoms. He instructed that Jaffray be kept very quiet on a low diet and stimulants, to be given every few hours. This treatment benefited Jaffray so that he was able to sit up in a favorite arm chair now and then and listen to Charles Dickens' story, "Our Mutual Friend," then running as a serial in Harper's Magazine, read to him by his little gray-eyed daughter ...
— The Little Immigrant • Eva Stern
... country! It looks for all the world like magnified pictures of the moon's surface. And," she added with a dreary kind of vindictiveness, "it's here, and I'm here. I can't get away from it—that's the dickens of it." Then, because Helen May had a certain impish sense of humor, she sat down and laughed at the incongruity of it all. "Me—me, here in the desert trying to raise goats! ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... 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
... complained bitterly when robbed of his time by those who had no right to it. An Italian scholar put over his door the inscription: "Whoever tarries here must join in my labors." Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, and Dickens signed a remonstrance against organ-grinders who disturbed ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... fight under the banner of Hawthorne in defence of the canal. The following sketch of one of the old picturesque Pennsylvania canals may be called a vignette, for it is a fragment without definite border or setting. But admirers of Dickens are respectfully requested to note that it is no mere fancy sketch of a poetic mind, but was drawn from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... other room was having something done to it, so we did yesterday. The chap stared at us, and Y. O. said, 'Hullo!' and he said, 'Hullo!' And Y. O. said, 'Who are you?' And he said, 'I'm a Time-traveller!' And we said, 'What the dickens is a Time-traveller?' And he said 'Like to come and see?' And we said, 'You bet your hat!' And he said, 'Hold my fist and shut your eyes!' So we did, and next thing we knew we were floating on our backs in the sea as calm and ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... Ah, that's it, is it? He's just the sort of fellow that would have no control over his daughter. (He goes back to his former place on the hearthrug with his back to the fire.) By the bye, what the dickens did he mean by all that about passing his life amid—what was it?—" scenes of suffering nobly endured and sacrifice willingly rendered by womanly women and manly men" and a lot more of the same sort? I suppose ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... only among our enemies, but among our friends and allies, it is agreed that hypocrisy is our national vice, our ruling passion. There must be some meaning in so widely held an opinion; and, on our side, there are damaging admissions by many witnesses. The portrait gallery of Charles Dickens is crowded with hypocrites. Some of them are greasy and servile, like Mr. Pumblechook or Uriah Heep; others rise to poetic heights of daring, like Mr. Chadband or Mr. Squeers. But Shakespeare's hypocrites enjoy themselves too ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... my luggage, and taking the Boston express. Your Tracer doesn't intend to stop my hansom and drag me into a cave, does he? You haven't put knock-outs into that Burgundy, have you? Then what in the dickens ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... to do is to keep up our spirits and be neighborly. We shall come all right in the end, never fear.—Dickens. ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... Radicals; and Scott was notoriously not a Radical. But his familiarity with all ranks from an early age is undoubted, and only very shallow or prejudiced observers will doubt the beneficial effect which this had on his study of humanity.[6] The uneasy caricature which mars Dickens's picture of the upper, and even the upper middle, classes is as much absent from his work as the complete want of familiarity with the lower which appears, for instance, in Bulwer. It is certain ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... consent, Dickens's masterpiece, showing, as it does, all his peculiar merits in their highest form. It is the most autobiographical of his novels, and the one into which he put most of ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Cruikshank found a competitor as eccentric as himself, as skilful a manipulator rem acu, the etching-point, and who drew incomparably better than he, George Cruikshank, did. He gave up the mediaeval in disgust; but he must have hugged himself with the thought that he had already illustrated Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist," and that the Frenchman, powerful as he was, could never hope to come near him in that terrific etching of "Fagin in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... of Lady Tennyson, Mrs. Tom Taylor, and Miss Hogarth (Dickens's sister-in-law) all rolled into one. Her house is full of relics of the past. There is a portrait of Dickens as a young man with long hair. He had a feminine face in those days, for all its strength. Hard by is a sketch of Keats by Severn, ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... or improved; and most likely you will take some little interest in so old a friend as the Falls of Niagara; for you must have read about those before you read Robinson Crusoe, and have had them thrust under your notice by every tourist, from Trollope to Dickens. They say, on dit, I mean, which is not translatable into English, that this is the age of Materialism and Utilitarianism. By George, you would think so indeed, if you had the chance of seeing the Falls of Niagara twice in ten years. They are materially injured ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... safe," said Mr. Sellyer, with an almost parental tone, "in fact, written quite in the old style, like the dear old books of the past—quite like"—here Mr. Sellyer paused with a certain slight haze of doubt visible in his eye—"like Dickens and Fielding and Sterne and so on. We sell a great many to ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... England: the number of advantages they have when they're boys, growing up. It gives them a tremendous head-start. Charles Dilke began meeting great men when he was a mere child: the Duke of Wellington, Thackeray, Dickens,—I could name a long list. And he had the close companionship of a grandfather, a man of distinction, who treated him as an equal, and devoted himself to his ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... our native raw material, sir?" asked she, fresh from a reading of Dickens, and his famous picture of ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... in the English language which is more elastic than the word novel as applied to what is commonly known as fiction. The word novel is used to describe stories that are as far apart as the Poles. Thus it is used to describe a classic by Thackeray or Dickens, or a clever love tale by Miss Dell, or a brilliantly outspoken sex tale by Miss Elinor Glyn, or a romance by Miss Corelli, or a tale of adventure by Joseph Conrad, or a very modern type of analytical novel by very modern writers who are a little bit young ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... worthy pedagogical countrymen, permit me to assure you that the aforesaid 'Squeers' is simply one of Dickens's inimitable caricatures." ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... harm nobody. You oughtn't to be runnin' round at large like this. Here! Leggo my arm! What the dickens are ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... though," said Tom with slow wrath, "and that is that I'm not green enough to be fooled by Nick Burr, if other people are. Father told me last night that it was Nick's own choice that took him to Jerry Pollard's. Choice, the Dickens! Why, it's those blasted people of his that put ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... and the southern part of the adjoining district of Bolandshahar were overrun; the forts of Kamona and Ganora were armed and placed in a state of defence; and the former defended against the British army under Major-General Dickens, on the 19th November, 1807, with such effect that the loss of the assailants, in officers and men, exceeded that sustained in many pitched battles. The subjugation of ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... said. "Petty patriotism, in its most naive form.... Dickens long ago noticed that trait of American character and so it goes on." My sly countryman skilfully interviewed his victim, disclosing step by step the ludicrous traits of a Yankee. There were many weak sides. Mr. Jackson, in whom ...
— The Shield • Various
... But the brown walls, the brown rug, the Mission furniture in weathered oak, the corner clock,—an excellent time-piece,—the fireplace with its bronze vases, the etchings of foreign architecture, and the bookcase with Ruskin, Eliot, Dickens, and all the Mid-Victorian celebrities in sets, produced but ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... mariner is careful about forsaking the steady finger of a proved compass in order to chase sounds around the corner in foggy weather. He understands that air strata raise the dickens with whistle-blasts. There are zones of ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Oscar. You might, you know, and it wouldn't do. He would hate to believe that he'd be happier buying things at a delicatessen, and he wouldn't believe it. But it's true, just as it is true that you would be happy shining boots and making love to the maids like a character in Dickens. ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... Knyphausen "does not stir as yet,"—the fact is, it was only put into Knyphausen's hands the day before YESTERDAY, as we soon discover; and Knyphausen is not so sure about it as some are! That Hotham Despatch is of Wednesday, 12th April. And not till yesterday could Guy Dickens report performance of the other important thing. Captain Guy Dickens, a brisk handy military man, Secretary to Dubourgay this good while past, "Has duly received from Headquarters the successive NOSTI-GRUMKOW documents, caught up in St. Mary Axe; has now delivered them to Knyphausen, to be laid ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... case is better than Dreyfus' and Sacco-Vanzetti's combined. Here I was prepared to remove the drug scourge forever, and at a piddling cost. Did I get courteous handling, or at least a fair hearing? Not bloody likely! I was an idiot to expect anything from the world's most inflated bureaucracy—Dickens' Circumlocution ...
— Revenge • Arthur Porges
... watching the street for Bicky and his uncle. It was one of those jolly, peaceful mornings that make a chappie wish he'd got a soul or something, and I was just brooding on life in general when I became aware of the dickens of a spate in progress down below. A taxi had driven up, and an old boy in a top hat had got out and was kicking up a frightful row about the fare. As far as I could make out, he was trying to get the cab chappie ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... told me," Gene answered sourly. "He's sore over something that happened last night, and he didn't seem to have any talk to give away this morning. He can go to the dickens, for all I care." ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... Danny De la Warr, Lord Devil's Dyke Dickens, Charles Dicker, The Dicul Ditchling Ditchling Beacon Donnington Dorking Duncton Beacon Dunford House ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... copies in his own hand, as, before the typewriting machine was invented, authors were wont to do. Within the last fortnight I heard the error attributed to the players made by an English scholar who is foremost in his own field of learning. He and I were looking at some of Dickens's MSS. They were full of erasions and corrections. I said, "How unlike Scott!" whose first draft of his novels exactly answered to the players' description of Will's "copy." My friend said, "Browning scarcely made an erasion or change in writing ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... Louis the XIV," gives some very interesting medical touches. Le Sage, in his "Adventures of Gil Blas," gives us food for speculating on medical philosophy in connection with the interesting subject of how to make the profession remunerative. Dickens's ideas of the doctor, as given in his works, are life touches. Witness his description of the little doctor who superintended little David Copperfield's advent into the world, or of Dr. Slammer of the army; they represent his view of the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... was Mr. Dickens, whom I now beheld for the first time, and was surprised to see looking so young. Mr. Justice Talfourd, known as the author of Ion, was also there with his lady. She had a ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... that an American author could not be expected to earn his own living in a country where foreign books could be pirated as they were in the United States until 1890, and this was especially true during the popularity of Dickens and George Eliot. Dickens was the great humanitarian writer of the nineteenth century, but he was also a caricaturist and a bohemian. He did not represent life as it is, but with a certain comical oddity. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... "The dickens you did!" George murmured, struck. But now that he knew the sketch to be the work of a woman he at once became more critical, perceiving in it imitative instead of original qualities. "What is it? I mean, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... abbey;[2] Dr. Cotton, the poet, lived and died in the same town, where the poet Cowper lodged with him at the "Collegium Insanorum". Bacon lived at Gorhambury and was buried in the neighbouring church of St. Michael. Bulwer Lytton lived and wrote at Knebworth, where he was visited by Forster, Dickens and others. George Chapman translated much of Homer at Hitchin, and is believed to have been born in that town. Young, the author of the Night Thoughts, was for many years Rector of Welwyn; his son was visited there by Boswell and Dr. Johnson. Macaulay was at school at ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... He had been on the "Traveller" branch of the London paper what would be called now a travelling correspondent. The Governor was replaced by Col. Gawler, and Mr. Stevenson went on The Register as editor. Mrs. Stevenson was a clever woman, and could help her husband. She knew Charles Dickens, and still better, the family of Hogarth, into which he married. My father and mother were surprised to find so good a paper and so well printed in the infant city. Then there were A. H. Davis, of the Reedbeds, and Nathaniel Hailes, ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... maundering volubly either about Jerome or Gerome. A famous actress was discoursing excitably about monogrammed hosiery. A hose clerk from a department store was loudly proclaiming his opinions of the drama. A writer was abusing Dickens. A magazine editor and a photographer were drinking a dry brand at a reserved table. A 36-25-42 young lady was saying to an eminent sculptor: "Fudge for your Prax Italys! Bring one of your Venus Anno Dominis down to Cohen's and see how quick she'd be turned down for a cloak model. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... reading The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, No Thoroughfare, and The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, the joint work of CHARLES DICKENS and WILKIE COLLINS, and now published for the first time in a single volume. He says that the book is instructive, inasmuch as it shows the growth of its authors' collaboration. When the writers started ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... "What the dickens does it all mean?" thought Guest wonderingly, as he followed into Stratton's chambers, with a strange feeling of expectancy exciting him. Something was going to happen, he felt sure, and that something would be connected with his friend. And now he began to regret bitterly having urged ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... Keene could not draw a lady or a gentleman. Why not add that he was neither a tennis player nor a pigeon shot, a waltzer nor an accomplished French scholar? The same terrible indictment has been preferred against Dickens, and Mr. Henry James says that Balzac failed to prove he was a gentleman. It might be well to remind Mr. James that the artist who would avoid the fashion plate would do well to turn to the coster rather than the duke for inspiration. Keene's genius ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... all that. You're a thousand times welcome, and I tell you right now nothing could have happened to please me better than meeting up with you. You can bet there's something besides chance in it. Now, naturally you're wondering what in the dickens two fellows of our stripe are doing wandering about up here in the Far Northwest ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... snowy. Thus, "the snowy ridge of mountains and craggy rocks," or, to express the meaning more clearly in English, the snowy serrated mountain-range. Bret Harte's capitalization of "Sierras" may be safely challenged. The lines are from his poem, Dickens in Camp. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... difficulty; but such is the inherently rhythmical strain of the English language, that the bad writer—and must I take for example that admired friend of my boyhood, Captain Reid?—the inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his earlier attempts to be impressive, and the jaded writer, as any one may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into the production of bad blank verse. And here it may be pertinently asked, Why ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that sooner or later," said Captain Blackie, the squadron commander, philosophically. "I suppose the supply of gentlemen does not go round, and they are getting some rubbish into the corps. One of you fellows drop a note over their aerodrome and ask them what the dickens they mean by it. Did ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... 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 ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... and whisperings and rustlings that seemed to be all round me, hiding in the night, turned out to be nothing after all. But when I didn't fancy him at my elbow, I imagined he was in the gunroom, wondering where the dickens ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... wrong about it," he muttered to himself on leaving the old man, "and, by dickens! I'll get to the bottom of it, or there's no taste in Salt-river. The fellow's a rascal; I feel it if I don't know it, and if Bill Hinkley don't pay him off, I must. One or t'other ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... dickens did he hear you, if you were in the dining-room?" asked Wyatt. "It's miles from his bedroom. You must tread ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... as venial but laudable when one can take advantage of a simpleton. No idea of "honour" enters into it. Even in England the old lady whist-player of the last generation required to be looked after pretty closely—if Mr. Charles Dickens is to be trusted. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... original, has been generally compared to Don Quixote and to the Pickwick Papers, while E. M. Vogue places its author somewhere between Cervantes and Le Sage. However considerable the influences of Cervantes and Dickens may have been—the first in the matter of structure, the other in background, humour, and detail of characterisation—the predominating and distinguishing quality of the work is undeniably something foreign to both and quite peculiar to itself; something which, for want of a better term, might ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of the changes on Creakle, Murdstone, Quinion—Quinion, Murdstone, Creakle—is inartistic and irritating. But from the philosophical and political point of view it is far worse. No Englishman with any sense of fact ever has taken, or could take, Dickens's characters as normal types. They are always fantastic exaggerations, full of genius occasionally, but as unlike actual reality as those illustrations by Cruikshank which are their nearest companions in the art of line. Of the three figures selected ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... didn't just funk it at that one time; it's his habit. I've always heard him say he hated to drive a car. Too lazy! Anyhow, there was the very dickens to pay. Before leaving the hill for his dash across the river he'd told March to consider ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... A 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
... have their uses. Richard Cobden lived to strike the boarding-school fallacy many a jolting blow; but it required Charles Dickens to complete the work by ridicule, just as Robert Ingersoll laughed the Devil out of church. We fight for everything until the world regards it as ridiculous, then we abandon it. So long as war is regarded ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... attorney, and a virtuous young man with a genius for mechanics, who should love, and protect, and ultimately marry the girl in the crimson room. Baudelaire has a few dainty sentences on the fancies that we are inspired with when we look through a window into other people's lives; and I think Dickens has somewhat enlarged on the same text. The subject, at least, is one that I am seldom weary of entertaining. I remember, night after night, at Brussels, watching a good family sup together, make merry, and retire ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Captain Costigan would scarcely have refused to take a sip of Mr. Micawber's punch, and I doubt, not that Litimer would have conspired darkly with Morgan, the Major's sinister man. Most of those delightful sets of old friends, the Dickens and Thackeray people, might well have met, though they belonged to very different worlds. In older novels, too, it might easily have chanced that Mr. Edward Waverley of Waverley Honour, came into contact with Lieutenant ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... said, "Why in the dickens don't you speak up, Skinny? If you know anything about it, why don't you say so? Do you want to ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... murder on me," he said, "I know there will, if that Boy don't do better! Now, where the pestering dickens can he be?" ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... powerful-looking, handsome young man, with broad bare breast, and in his shirt-sleeves, squatted full in front of the blaze, like the household goblin described by Milton, or the "Christmas Present" of Dickens. Mr. Elder left us for the steamer, in which he prosecuted his voyage next morning to Skye; and we tumbled in, each to his narrow bed,—comfortable enough sort of resting places, though not over soft; and slept so soundly, that we failed to mark Mr. Elder's return for a few ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... "Who the dickens has been butting into your affairs now?" demanded Nolan peevishly, and though the girls laughed, there was no laughter in his eyes and no smile ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... came, passion between man and woman had meant animal passion. Fielding and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. A woman's gentle, legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and passion was another. Thackeray and Dickens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To all three of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, temporary, episodic, and therefore comparatively unimportant. Thackeray intimated that he could have done more with it but for his fear ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... trying days she had recurrently wondered what this strange young man would have to say that Dickens and Hugo had not already said. That was the true marvel of it. No matter how many books one read, each was different, as each human being was different. Some had the dignity and the aloofness of a rock in the sea; and others were as the polished pebbles on the sands—one saw ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... that my Warwick Lane serial should combine, as far as my powers allowed, the human interest and genial humour of Dickens with the plot-weaving of G. W. R. Reynolds; and, furnished with these broad instructions, I filled my ink bottle, spread out my foolscap, and, on a hopelessly wet afternoon, began my first novel—now known as "The Trail ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... an 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 persons, however, was beyond power of human achievement; ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... Society, or to any claim founded on the production of a tale for Blackwood's Magazine, and of two sonnets for "Friendship's Offering"; or if perchance there were any festering sharp thorn in Mr. Harrison's side in the shape of some distinguished radical, Sir Charles Dilke, or Mr. Dickens, or anybody who had ever said anything against taxation, or the Post Office, or the Court of Chancery, or the Bench of Bishops,—then would Mr. Harrison, if he had full faith in his Chairman, cunningly arrange with him some delicate little extinctive operation to be performed on that malignant ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... was. She certainly don't seem to object to your friend CULCHARD. What the dickens she can see in him, I don't know!—but it's no use my putting my oar in. She'd only jump ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... read romances and tales early, like Dickens; he may have amused his little brothers and his sister Joan by repeating to them on winter evenings in the low room in Henley Street the story of the wild castle of Elsinore, or of the venerable Lear and the gentle Cordelia. He was all imagination, and ...
— Harper's Young People, October 12, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... for Duchesses turned tweeny-maids Or following other unobtrusive trades There's nothing very wonderful or new Or difficult to credit in the view; For DICKENS—whom I never fail to bless For solace in these days of storm and stress— Found his best ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... the rich gluttons whose dainties and state-beds awakened Villon's covetous temper. And every morning's sun sees thousands who pass whistling to their toil. But Villon was the "mauvais pauvre" defined by Victor Hugo, and, in its English expression, so admirably stereotyped by Dickens. He was the first wicked sans-culotte. He is the man of genius with the moleskin cap. He is mighty pathetic and beseeching here in the street, but I would not go down a dark road with him ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... quick action he laid his pipe upon the table; sprang to her side. His right arm he put about her, in his left hand he clasped both hers. "Nothing wrong," he cried brightly; "not a bit wrong. Mary, it's a game, a plot, a dickens ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... thread. We are reminded that the original Bride of Lammermoor was a Miss Dalrymple; that the "laughing Tom" of Thackeray's "Ballad of Bouillabaise" was Thomas Frazer, Paris correspondent of the Morning Chronicle; that the dramatist of Nicholas Nickleby, so savagely assaulted by Dickens in the course of the work, was a Mr. Moncrief, who would never have prepared the story for the stage if Dickens ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... immemorial, malaria (or fever-and-ague) has been one of the great plagues of humanity. No advance outpost of civilization but has suffered, more or less severely, from this disease. Dickens, in one of his novels, describes graphically the disease as it existed in the early American settlements, and vividly portrays its ravages, both mental and physical, among the pioneer settlers. Certain sections of the world have been especially noted ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... of Philautus is especially well drawn, though at times blurred and indistinct. Lyly had not yet passed the stage of creating types, that is of portraying one aspect and an obvious one of such a complex thing as human nature. But a criticism which would be applicable to Dickens is no condemnation of an Elizabethan pioneer. It was much to have attempted characterization, and in the case of Philautus, Iffida, Camilla, and perhaps "the Violet" the attempt was nearly if not quite successful. It is noticeable that for one who was afterwards to ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... answer. Because most of the books which seemed good to her did not, as she well knew, seem good to Neville, or to any of her children, and she wasn't going to give herself away. She murmured something about Thackeray and Dickens, which ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... "It's one of Dickens' impossible stage sets come true!" I exclaimed. "It looks as though it might be a burglars' den or somebody's back yard, but anyway, it ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... what practical work lies ready to their hands. Most of our scientific men are in this last class; our popular authors either set themselves definitely against all religious form, pleading for simple truth and benevolence (Thackeray, Dickens), or give themselves up to bitter and fruitless statement of facts (De Balzac), or surface-painting (Scott), or careless blasphemy, sad or smiling (Byron, Beranger). Our earnest poets and deepest thinkers are doubtful and indignant (Tennyson, Carlyle); one ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... him gaily, "Hum! Golly de do to-day? Hum! Lily-white Buckra Sailee" - (You notice his playful way?) - "What dickens you doin' here, sar? Why debbil you want to come? Hum! Picaninnee, dere isn't no sea ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... Mac's other boot cleaned, a little sight-seeing was suggested as a modest and inexpensive way of passing the afternoon. The Pyramids were stale, besides being a dickens of a distance off. The gunner voted for the Citadel, and Mac didn't mind, though he had been there once already. They made their way towards a gharry stand, and, spurning clamouring drivers from their path, comfortably seated themselves in the one which appeared ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... honorarium, there being no international copyright law at that time, a sum of money larger than the publisher gave him for the manuscript. He also received kindly words of appreciation from Rogers, Brougham, Moore, Bulwer, Dickens and others, and fifteen years later his reputation secured him a large social and literary reception in England in 1856. At last, in 1868, the original copyright expired and my father brought out the "author's edition'' thoroughly revised ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... answered, "girls are the very dickens. You can't trust 'em. Never have anything to do with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... permanent record, more especially as the direction of their eccentricity is, for the most part, in itself curious and uncommon. Love, for instance, has been responsible for many strange and curious vows in the past, and some years ago it was stated that the original of Charles Dickens's Miss Havisham was living in the flesh not far from Ventnor in the person of an old maiden lady, who, because of the maternal objection to some love affair in her early life, made and kept a vow that she would retire to her bed, and there spend the remainder of her days. It was a stern vow but she ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... of the main building, however, that one should go to realize some of Dickens' pictures of pauper life, for there is a picture here that needs no exaggeration to make it appear on a par with those in fiction. In this attic live the older women, and they pass their sleeping hours and many of their waking ones under ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... he lighted the lantern, and the letters F. C. C. showed clearly on the glass, he added, in a tone of still greater amazement: "Ferro-Carril Central! Why, it b'longs t' one o' th' boys on th' Central!—but how th' dickens did it ever get here? An' here's a lot of old clothes—th' sort o' rags th' low-down Greasers wear. An' I'm blest," he went on, as he picked up a scrap of paper from the floor, "if this ain't a Mexican Central ticket from ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... actor and manager, in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, the theatre which he leased in New York being renamed Burton's theatre. He had much popular success as Captain Cuttle in John Brougham's dramatization of Dombey and Son, and in other low comedy parts in plays from Dickens's novels. Burton was the author of a large number of plays, one of which, Ellen Wareham (1833), was produced simultaneously at five London theatres. In Philadelphia he established the Gentleman's Magazine, of which Edgar Allan Poe ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the exploration of its continents; in the frequentation of its inhabitants; that the pleasure which he has to give consists. How he came himself to discover it is as undiscoverable as how his in some sort analogue Dickens, after pottering not unpleasantly with Bozeries, "thought of Mr. Pickwick," and so of the rest of his human (and extra-human) comedy. But the facts, in both cases fortunately, remain. And it may be possible to indicate at least some qualities and characteristics of the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... with something of a start; "the dickens, you say!" And he took up the letter and read it. He was not a very good penman, was little Will. The Captain had even a harder time of it than the Sergeant had had making out ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... the exception of Lavengro and the Rommany Rye, {5} I cannot recall a single novel, in our language, in which the writer has shown familiarity with the real life, habits, or language of the vast majority of that very large class, the itinerants of the roads. Mr Dickens has set before us Cheap Jacks, and a number of men who were, in their very face, of the class of which I speak; but I cannot recall in his writings any indication that he knew that these men had a singular secret life with their confreres, or that they could speak a strange language; for ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... 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. She had turned crusty, ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... dickens do you want me to do? Burn down Academy Hall or chuck one of the Faculty in the ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... were moderately well provided with good modern fiction, and very well provided with such authors as Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Bulwer-Lytton and Dickens. With all respect to the kind givers of these books, I would suggest that the literature most acceptable to us in the circumstances under which we did most of our reading, that is in Winter Quarters, was the best of the more recent novels, such as Barrie, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... puts me a good bit in mind of Professor Craigie when I was a lad. I felt as if I was a baby in arms beside him, but he seemed as pleased to see me as I was to see him. No, he hasn't got a long white beard, and he doesn't look a bit like Ruskin or Tennyson or Dickens. Do you remember when you said you thought he had bushy eyebrows and a white beard, years ago? He's not above forty-five, I should say; but I'm no judge of age after folks are forty, I'm so afraid of putting my foot in it. He's much bigger ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... studied your habits and has taken advantage of them. Then I ask if you are in the habit of taking these midnight strolls, and with some signs of hesitation you say that you have never done such a thing before. Charles Dickens was very fond of that kind of thing, and I naturally imagined that you had the same fancy. But you had never done it before. And, the only time, a man is nearly murdered in ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... 1807 the governing powers of Great Britain forced excise duties on teas up to ninety per cent. of their cost, tea had been proved to be so beneficial and essential to happiness by British workers that Charles Dickens, in reviewing the situation, presents it as follows:—"And yet the washerwomen looked to her afternoon 'dish of tea' as something that might make her comfortable after her twelve hours of labor, and balancing her saucer on a tripod of three fingers, breathed a joy beyond utterance as ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... "God's own country," but her National Anthem, "My Country, 'tis of thee," dating from 1832, fixes the date when America, soon after the second war with England, which ended in 1814, consciously felt herself as a Holy Land; far as visitors like Dickens felt her from the perfection implied in her soaring Spread-Eagle rhetoric. The Pilgrim Fathers went to America merely for their own freedom of religious worship: they were actually intolerant to others. From a sectarian patriotism developed what I have called ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... critics who, intellectually baffled by the problem in Mrs Warren's Profession, have made a virtue of running away from it. I will illustrate their method by quotation from Dickens, taken from the fifth ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... journalism knows how widely spread is the human conviction that, failing all else, any one can "write for the papers," making a lucrative living on easy terms, amid agreeable circumstances. I have often wondered how Dickens, familiar as he was with this frailty, did not make use of it in the closing epoch of Micawber's life before he quitted England. Knowing what he did, as letters coming to light at this day testify, it would seem to be the ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... Johnson? Would we forget The pictured cup; those merry times, When round the board, with ready rhymes Waller, Dryden, and Addison—Young, Grave Pope to Gay, when Cowper sung? Sydney Smith, too; gentle Lamb brew, Tennyson, Dickens, Doctor Holmes knew. The cup that cheered, those sober souls, And tiny tea-trays, samovars, and bowls. . . . So here's a toast to the queen of plants, The queen of plants—Bohea! Good wife, ring for your maiden aunts, We'll all have ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... blast'n' instead of shovelin' dirt on the hillside—everybody was putt'n' down a shaft instead of scrapin' the surface. Noth'n' would do Jim, but we must tackle the ledges, too, 'n' so we did. We commenced putt'n' down a shaft, 'n' Tom Quartz he begin to wonder what in the Dickens it was all about. He hadn't ever seen any mining like that before, 'n' he was all upset, as you may say—he couldn't come to a right understanding of it no way—it was too many for him. He was down on it too, you bet you—he was down on it powerful—'n' always appeared to consider it the cussedest ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... deep water about here. The whole of the coast is very curious in that way. What the—what the dickens is this?" ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... has just been recalled, I'm sorry to say, but probably we shall get another one. Five Canadian officers came in last night. The guns are making the dickens of a noise, very loud and sudden. Yesterday they shelled the town again, and two ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... England and Wales six million persons who can neither read nor write, that is to say, about one-third of the population, including, of course, infants; but of all the children more than one-half attend no place of public instruction."—Dickens, "Household Words." ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... York Times, Mr. J.S. Moore writes: As I am on the subject of glass, and as the members of the Pan-American Congress are inspecting our magnificent metropolis, I wish to call their attention to two subjects. First, our dirty streets, and second, our splendid windows. Dickens has immortalized the "Golden Dustman." In this city we have the "Dirty Ringman," or we may say "Ringmen." There have been millions in New York's dirty streets. The most honest and persevering Mayors and other high officials have got ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... earnest woman finds its own exclusive utterance; and we get a something of tenderness, of sweetness, and of subtlety which is pre-eminently feminine. The world could not afford to lose this, though great performers were twenty times more numerous than they are. The age which has produced a Dickens and a "George Eliot," a Holman Hunt and a Rosa Bonheur, a Story and a Harriet Hosmer, must needs have added to the scroll upon which the titles of Joachim, of Vieuxtemps, and of Ole Bull are inscribed, ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... Winspit 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
... De Guenthers are in it, too!" said Allan. "What the dickens has this girl done to ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... these words we would have treated the boast as a vulgar exhibition of provincial "spread-eagleism," such as characterized certain classes in this country before the Civil War, and which Charles Dickens somewhat over-caricatured in Martin Chuzzlewit, but in the mouth of Bismarck, with his cynical indifference to moral considerations in questions of statecraft, this piece of rhetorical spread double-eagleism, manifests the spirit of the Prussian military ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... for I wondered at his speaking to such a dignified-looking personage so familiarly, not to say curtly; for I thought that this Mr. Boffin, in spite of his well-known name out of Dickens, must be at the least a senator of these strange people. However, he got up and said, "All right, old oar-wearer, whatever you like; this is not one of my busy days; and though" (with a condescending bow to me) "my pleasure of a talk with this learned guest is ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... to mingle instruction with entertainment; and the humorous touches, especially in the sketch of John Holl, the Westminster dustman, Dickens himself could hardly ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... courts, the prison-chapel being in the keep. In the town several large manufactories attest the presiding genius of Lancashire, and the inn is the comfortable and old-fashioned King's Arms described by Dickens. ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... overpraise Balzac in parts or to mispraise him as a whole. But so long as inappropriate and superfluous comparisons are avoided and as his own excellence is recognized and appreciated, it is scarcely possible to overestimate that excellence in itself and for itself. He stands alone; even with Dickens, who is his nearest analogue, he shows far more points of difference than of likeness. His vastness of bulk is not more remarkable than his peculiarity of quality; and when these two things coincide ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... and at the corner of the street, facing the Square, was Uncle Mathew's hotel. It was a place for the use, in the main, of commercial gentlemen, and it was said by eager searchers after local colour, to have retained a great deal of the Dickens spirit. In the hall there was a stout gentleman with a red nose, a soiled waiter, a desolate palm and a large-bosomed lady all rings and black silk, in a kind of wooden cage. Down the stairs came a dim vapour that smelt of beef, whisky and tobacco, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... enjoy them. Sometimes, I have a Dickens spasm, and read some of his books for the nth time. I have frittered away much time in my life trying to discover whether a book is worth a second reading. If it isn't, it is hardly worth a first reading, I don't get tired of my friend Brown, so why ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... maiden name was Elizabeth 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 grouped ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... woman who has essayed to depict the slave character has miserably failed, unless inoculated with the genuine spirit of the negro; and even those who have succeeded best have done only moderately well, because they have not had the negro nature. It is reserved to some black Shakspeare or Dickens to lay open the wonderful humor, pathos, poetry, and power which slumber in the negro's soul, and which now and then flash out like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... suggested, naively reinforcing his simile. "I don't know what the dickens they're all meant for, but a good many of them seem to have escaped from the Lyceum—Juliets, and Portias, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... old Joe Willet, the landlord, stood smoking in his shirt-sleeves, while pretty Dolly Varden herself was tripping down to town. "There," said my host, "isn't that clever? It stood for many years at the 'Hen and Chickens' in Birmingham, and Dickens used to admire it very much when he used to visit that town on his reading tours." Two little Japanese figures, reposing upon the top of the case which contained this model, looked down upon Mr. Toole as he stood beneath ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... come to think about it, how it 's all planned out it 's splendid. Nuthin 's done er evah happens, 'dout hit 's somefin' dat 's intended; Don't keer whut you does, you has to, an' hit sholy beats de dickens,— Viney, go put on de kittle, I got one ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... me to give you this," unclasping her warm little palm where the bit of white paper lay. "The Dickens she did," exclaimed the old gentleman; "so she has had a last word with you, has she? Well, she won't get another for a long spell; so never mind. Now, let's see what Cousin Eunice says. Something interesting, no doubt." He spread the ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney |
