"Dickens" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Democratic daily newspaper, from 1831 to 1844, succeeding James Gordon Bennett in the editorial chair. At the time of his death he owned the Saturday Gazette, which he and Morton McMichael had established. His "Charcoal Sketches" (Philadelphia, 1837), which Charles Dickens republished in London, were originally contributed to the Pennsylvanian under the title, "City Worthies." His wife, Alice Bradley Haven (1828-1863), contributed, while a school-girl, several sketches under the name of Alice G. Lee to the Saturday Gazette. She was generally known as ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... gallows on the yard of a lamp-post at the corner of the Rue de la Vannerie) by his heartless sneer, "Eh bien! si cette canaille n'a pas de pain, elle mangera du foin." He was hanged, July 22, 1789. See The Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, cap. xxii.; see, too, Carlyle's French Revolution, 1839, i. 253: "With wild yells, Sansculottism clutches him, in its hundred hands: he is whirled ... to the 'Lanterne,' ... pleading bitterly for life,—to the deaf winds. Only with the third rope (for two ropes broke, and the quavering voice ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... attracted the paragraphers; they fell upon them like hungry trout, and a perfect fusillade of paragraphs began. This is exactly what the editor wanted; and he followed these two series immediately by inducing the daughter of Charles Dickens to write of "My Father as I Knew Him," and Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher, of "Mr. Beecher as I Knew Him." Bok now felt that he had given the newspapers enough ammunition to last for some time; and he turned his attention to building up a more ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... with the forecast that it may be demolished at any moment. The confinement is dreadful. To sit and listen as if waiting for death in a horrible manner, would drive me insane. I don't know what others do, but we read when I am not scribbling in this. H—— borrowed somewhere a lot of Dickens's novels, and we re-read them by the dim light in the cellar. When the shelling abates, H—— goes to walk about a little, or get the 'Daily Citizen,' which is still issuing a tiny sheet at twenty-five and fifty cents a copy. It is, of course, but a rehash of speculations ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... cottage called the Dickens House, where Charles Dickens lived for some time. It is only one story high—white with green shutters—stands at the end of an old-fashioned garden filled with all sorts of ordinary garden-flowers—roses, hollyhocks, larkspurs, pinks, all growing most luxuriantly ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... Provencal sketches are certain vignettes of the capital, swift silhouettes of Paris, glimpsed by an unforgetting eye, the "Last Book," for one, in which an unlovely character is treated with kindly contempt; and for another, the "Book-keeper," the most Dickens-like of Daudet's shorter pieces, yet having a literary modesty Dickens never attained. The alleged imitation of the British novelist by the French may be left for later consideration; but it is possible now to note that in the earlier descriptive chapters of the "Letters ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... been interested in the various musical references in Dickens' works, and have had the impression that a careful examination of his writings would reveal an aspect of his character hitherto unknown, and, I may add, unsuspected. The centenary of his birth hastened a work long contemplated, ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... hero into temptation, the incarnation of evil, which it is always necessary that the novelist should have personified in one of his characters to enable him to bring about his misfortunes, his tragedies, and various requisite catastrophes. Scott had his Varney and such-like; Dickens his Bill Sykes and such-like; all of whom are properly disposed of before the end of those volumes in which ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... entire rest to the dark-browed, deep-eyed thinker who smiled before him. The only anecdote of Mr. Bennoch which I remember is of a Scotchman who, at an inn, was wandering disconsolately about the parlor while his dinner was being prepared. A distinguished traveler—Dickens, I think—was dashing off a letter at the centre-table, describing the weather and some of the odd fellows he had observed in his travels. "And," he wrote, "there is in the room at the present moment a long, lank, red-headed, empty-brained nincompoop, who looks as ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... youth told me I should end my days on the gallows trap. The same woman when drunk would lift up her dress, sardonically, exposing herself. Other old women would congregate in the neglected and dirty bedrooms and tell fortunes with the cards. One little woman, an onanist, was like a character out of Dickens, exaggerated, affected, unnatural, with remains of gentility and society manners. Amidst all this drunkenness and abandonment May, the landlady's daughter, preserved her virginity. Young lodgers would ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... his father for having made reading interesting to him. He remembered that the books his father had read to him and had given him to read, books that crammed the small bookcase near the fireplace and filled every shelf and table in the room, were the very best—Dickens, Thackeray, Washington Irving, Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Addison, and of the later writers, Kipling, O. Henry, Anatole France, ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... Next Wednesday is the anniversary dinner of the Royal Literary Fund Society, held in Freemasons' Hall. Octavian Blewitt, the secretary, offered me a ticket for the ladies' gallery. I should have seen all the great literati and artists gathered in the hall below, and heard them speak; Thackeray and Dickens are always present among the rest. This cannot now be. I don't think all London can afford another sight to me ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a sample of filial humor much more subtle than that indulged in by Charles Dickens, who pilloried his parents in print, one as Mr. Micawber and the other as Mrs. Nickleby. Dickens told the truth and painted it large, but Francois Arouet dealt in indiscreet fallacy when he endeavored to give his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... journalist on The Times and The Morning Herald, contributed a series of light articles to The Illustrated London News, conducted in 1846 The Almanack of the Month and found time to produce some fifty or sixty plays, among them dramatized versions of Dickens's shorter stories in collaboration with Mark Lemon. As poor-law commissioner he presented a valuable report to the home secretary regarding scandals in connexion with the Andover Union, and in 1849 he became a metropolitan pouce magistrate. He died at Boulogne on the 30th of August ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... she would 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
... the names of Copperfield and Snodgrass with a little difficulty, but the name of Dickens is as familiar to us and as near to our hearts as the names of ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... panic consequent upon the Frog Lake massacre and furnished food for serious thought to the cunning Chief, Little Pine, and his four hundred and fifty Crees, as well as to the sullen Salteaux, Big Bear, with his three hundred braves. And to the lasting credit of Inspector Dickens it stands that he brought his little company of twenty-two safe through a hostile country overrun with excited Indians and half-breeds to the post of Battleford, ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... velvet waistcoat and amber gloves, is not by any means the veritable Sir Edward Lytton, who is discoverable only in 'Ernest Maltravers,' where his soul is deliberately and nakedly set forth. And who would ever know Dickens by looking at him or talking with him, or doing anything with him except reading his 'Curiosity Shop?' What poet, in especial, but must feel at least the better portion of himself more fairly represented in even his commonest sonnet, (earnestly written,) ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... Marie Manning (an ex-lady's maid, whose career is said to have suggested Hortense in Bleak House to Dickens) was executed with her husband, in 1849, for the murder of a guest. She wore black satin on the scaffold, a material which consequently became unpopular ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... but rather wish Mr Mulready had chosen a better subject. George's adventures were written with a nice satire; for Goldsmith knew what and whom he had to describe. The reasons why he would not do for an usher, are well put. Is it not possible that Mr Dickens took his first hint of Do-the-boys' Hall from reading this passage in Goldsmith? Indeed, there may be a suspicion that Mrs Primrose gave the idea of Mrs Nickleby, though he has made her an original. But to return to the traveller—we should like to have seen an "illustration" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... turn to the leaders of the modern schools of fiction, we shall find that some of them, like George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, are even more closely realistic than Thackeray—who, says Mr. Howells, is a caricaturist, not a true realist—and of others such as Dickens and Meredith, we shall find that, in whatever way they deviate from realism as strictly understood, it is not in the direction ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Rabelais Dickens Thomas Hardy Dante Goethe Walter Pater Shakespeare Matthew Arnold Dostoievsky El Greco Shelley Edgar Allan Poe Milton Keats Walt Whitman Charles ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... 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 about them, and the evil elements in ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... pipe elbow that a profane man had been attempting to fit to a five-inch stove pipe. It looked like some old dripping pan that had been thrown out in the street, and had been run over by wagons. It looked like the very dickens. And yet we have no doubt Hatch will say this is a lie, because he now wears a good hat, but we know the hat he now wears he got by trading a flannel shirt to a grasshopper sufferer, and it no more resembles the beautiful new hat he won ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... shells' buried in the dust of a neglected magazine; and in the hands of Carlyle they came to life again and worked havoc among the traditional judgements of history. This book was also the turning point in his career. Dickens, Thackeray, and others hailed it with enthusiasm; gradually it made its way with the public at large; and as in the following years Carlyle, prompted by some friends, gave successful courses of lectures,[3] his position among men of letters ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... the king's obvious ennui as long as he could, then he rose and cried: "O King! live for ever, but Medill and I must pull our freight!" This version probably is apochryphal! The Italian colonel declares that Henry expostulated: "Well, how in the dickens was I to know that a king always gives the high sign for ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... friends; for whether he was in Germany, or Spain, or England, he was everywhere given ovations that were fit for a king, and was everywhere entertained by the best people in the most sumptuous manner. At one time he stayed for five weeks with Charles Dickens in his home at Gad's Hill, and the two were ever afterward firm friends. All of these people loved Andersen, not because of his fame, but because of the stories which had brought him fame, and because ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... doing generous but rather foolish things, and the adjective quixotic now describes this sort of action. A quite different character, the Jew in Shakespeare's play, "The Merchant of Venice," has given us the expression "a Shylock." From Dickens's famous character Mrs. Gamp in "Martin Chuzzlewit," who always carried a bulgy umbrella, we get the word gamp, rather a vulgar name ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... by Hogarth and sung by Swift. In Ely Place once lived the Bishop of Ely; and in Hatton Garden resided Queen Elizabeth's favourite, the dancing chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton. In Furnival's Inn Dickens wrote "Pickwick." In Barnard's Inn died the last of the alchemists. In Staple's Inn Dr. Johnson wrote "Rasselas," to pay the expenses of his mother's funeral. In Brooke Street, where Chatterton poisoned ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... seem the least bit funny at the time. I just felt awful. What would the dear old woman say to this profanation? Why the dickens did people have whitewashed walls on which sacrilegious stains were luridly visible? I looked up and down the hall like Moses when he slew that Egyptian, trembling lest the old woman should come in. How could I make ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... friends, I suppose no one not prominently engaged in 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 most natural thing ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... disenthralled people—I saw features on women's faces that haunted me afterward in my dreams. I saw children with shrivelled, attenuated limbs, and countenances that were old in misery and vice—such men, women, and children as Dickens and Charlotte Elizabeth tell about. My little grand-daughter was recovering from a severe illness, not long ago, and I found her weeping in her old nurse's arms. 'O! grandpa,' said she, as I inquired the cause of her distress, 'I have been reading "The Little Pin-headers."' I wept ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... you 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 o' ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the cases there was a learned discussion. The label simply said "Anemone." On the rocks and shells were some things shaped like stars and mushrooms, except that they were moss-colored and had whiskers floating out in the water. "Annymone, what the dickens are they?" asked a man ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... wit and manners, the cream of the old South, and gradually all drew together in one great group. They talked of many things, of almost everything except the war, of the news from Europe, of the books that they had read—Scott and Dickens, Thackeray and Hugo—and of the music that they had heard, particularly the favourite ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... squarely and said: "The other day you said there was a reason for all kinds o' social tricks; now will you tell me what the dickens is the why of all these funny-do's? It 'pears to me a free-born American didn't ought to take off his hat to any one ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... fifty 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 ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... procuring and reading Elia's famous and immortal essays. Since then I have been a constant reader of Elia, and a most zealous admirer of Charles Lamb the author and Charles Lamb the man. Thackeray, you remember, somewhere mentions a youthful admirer of Dickens, who, when she is happy, reads "Nicholas Nickleby,"—when she is unhappy, reads "Nicholas Nickleby,"—when she is in bed, reads "Nicholas Nickleby,"—when she has nothing to do, reads "Nicholas Nickleby,"—and when she has finished the book, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... School Board, and was chosen chaplain of the State Senate. He invited the anti-slavery lecturers into his church, and helped philanthropists of other denominations in their work. Father Taylor [the Methodist preacher to the sailors], to whom Dickens gave an English fame, found in him his most important supporter when establishing the Seaman's Mission in Boston. This was told me by Father Taylor himself in his old age. I happened to be in his company once, when he spoke rather sternly about my leaving the Methodist Church; but when I spoke ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... how things look to a boy who has not got the facilities for being too good in his youth. Some boys can take things as they read them, and not think any for themselves, but I am a Thinker from Thinkerville, and my imagination plays the dickens with me. There is nothing I read about old times but what I compare it with the same line of business at the present day. Now, when I think of the fishermen of Galilee, drawing their seines, I wonder what they ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... the first study of Frith's "Dolly Varden," Sir Robert said: "Frith painted three 'Dolly Vardens.' One of these was a commission from Dickens in 1844, for which he received L20. When Frith asked Dickens if he wanted the sketch, his reply was, 'No, of course I don't.' That is the sketch which Dickens refused, for which I paid the small sum of fifteen guineas. At his ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 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 which is said to be "better worth reading ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... and it is quite possible that it was one of Anthony Trollope's novels. It is very likely. My acquaintance with him was then very recent. He is one of the English novelists whose works I read for the first time in English. With men of European reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was otherwise. My first introduction to English imaginative literature was "Nicholas Nickleby." It is extraordinary how well Mrs. Nickleby could chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... go on for weeks, m'son. And after all is over, you'll wonder where the dickens they all went to. Montana is some bigger than you realize, I guess. And next fall, when shipping starts, you'll think you're seeing raw porterhouse steaks for the whole world. Let's drift out uh this dust; you'll have time to get ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... refer in any way to the Russian Government and its methods. At the time of our visit "Quo Vadis" was on everybody's lips, and the solitary copy had been read and re-read into rags, although it had only been a month in the settlement. Dickens, Thackeray, Zola, and Anthony Hope were favourite authors, but whole pages were missing from most of the volumes in the tiny library, and the books were otherwise mutilated, not by carelessness or ill usage, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... were Dickens and Thackeray, and Sydney Smith was very fond of the artist; and it is said that when the great wit was asked to sit to Landseer for his portrait, he replied in the words of the haughty Syrian: "Is thy servant a dog that he should ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... have suggested, teachers will find a wide field in attractive stories of helpful cooeperative home life. Extracts from many of Miss Alcott's stories, the Cratchits' Christmas dinner from Dickens' Christmas Carol, and many other delightful glimpses of home life can be read, or, better, dramatized, with little ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... instead, and I did him one in a different style and not half as good, and of course he liked it even better. Since then, I've done him quite a few. It isn't that I've needed the money; but it's a margin, and colours and frames, etc. come to a dickens of a ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... high order, whether we take books—which are issued at this time by the hundred—or the special numbers of magazines and newspapers, all of which have rubbishing stories with some tag in them relating to Christ-tide. Tales of ghosts, etc., were at one time very fashionable, and even Dickens pandered to this miserable style of writing, not ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... Germany, and Spain, and in 1847 he came to England, where, to his great delight, he found his stories better known than even in his own country. He was a welcome guest at many of our great houses, and, on a second visit to England some few years later, he stayed with Charles Dickens ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... 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
... I wish this article could be written by Samuel Warren. And failing that, I wish that Charles Dickens, who wrote in his "American Notes" with such passionate disgust and hostility about the first Cunarder, retailing all the discomfort and misery of crossing the Atlantic by steamship, could have shared ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... branch of literature. There is independence of hours: the pay depends upon the man's power of work: there are great openings in it and—to the rising lad at least—what seems a noble possibility in the shape of pay. Many distinguished men have been journalists, from Charles Dickens downward. Nearly all the novelists have dabbled with journalism; and, since all of us cannot be novelists, the young man might reflect that there are editor, sub-editors, assistant editors, news-editors, leader writers, descriptive writers, reviewers, dramatic critics, art and music ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... mountains. She has been known to walk with him forty miles in a single day. Many English women are famous walkers, but her record is beyond them all. Such excessive exercise is bad for a man, as was proved in the case of Dickens, who doubtless injured himself much by such long pedestrian trips after brain labor; but no woman can endure such a strain as this, and the adoring sister not only failed to be a companion to her idolized brother, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... and Grandy something about his fortune. But his accident had somehow paralysed his throat, and he could scarcely articulate. But for an hour or more, as he lay dying, he would look at them with piercing glances, and say what sounded like dickens! gold!" ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... saying to himself: "By golly! I ain't going to even try to be a society guy with him no more. I'm just going to be me, and if he don't like it he can go to the dickens." ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... Chick, as he heard Cervera move quickly away. "Evidently there is something amiss between them, but what the dickens is it?" ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... course I know exactly what you are going to say. You are going to ask: If I am telling you the truth, why the dickens did I not do as I am advising you to do, and bring back a wagon-load of gold with me? My dear chap, I did! That is to say, I got the gold all right. But, unfortunately for me, I had a partner in the expedition, a Boer named Van Raalte, who was cursed with an outrageously quarrelsome disposition ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... an excitement it raised)—that "On the Monday night following Mr. Horn would read aloud, to such of his friends as would do him the honor of being present, the latest Christmas story by Mr. Charles Dickens, entitled 'The Cricket on the Hearth.'" For this occasion Mr. Kennedy had loaned him his own copy, one of the earliest bound volumes, bearing on its fly-leaf an inscription in the great master's own handwriting in which he thanked the distinguished author of "Swallow ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... be blessed if I can see what in the dickens that revolver of Mainwaring's had to ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... turned 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 ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... passed within a few miles of us, and sent an order from General Morgan for two companies. Companies D and E, Captains Dickens and Terrill, ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... it was with dingy-looking volumes, dusky old legal books, works of reference, books atheistical, theological, metaphysical, or scientific. On one shelf, amid this strangely heterogeneous collection, she kept her own particular treasures—Brian's Longfellow, one or two of Dickens's books which Tom had given her, and the beloved old Grimm and Hans Andersen, which had been the friends of her childhood and which for "old sakes' sake" she had never had the heart to sell. The only other trace ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... those of the Poor Man in the Owyhee district, the principal veins of the Wood River region, the Ramshorn at Challis, the Custer and Charles Dickens, at Bonanza City, etc. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... cannot allow," said the doctor, "it would make your head ache, but I have no objection to someone reading to you some nice, amusing novel, Dickens's "Pickwick Papers," for instance, or a story of Marryat's, something light and amusing, I mean, which will not excite ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... 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," "John Halifax, Gentleman," "The Cloister and the Hearth," ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... to myself. "So you walk into this trap, do you, and calmly trust me to get you out. Serve you right if I don't move hand or foot." And I almost made up my mind that I wouldn't. But I was interested. I wanted intensely to know what the dickens Anthony was up to, and whether he would have been up to it if he'd known the sort of young woman he had ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... them in the eyes of the white men, and many curious stories linger amongst the old-timers as to his habits and appearance. It is interesting to know that the bishop was a son of that Sergeant Bompas of the English bar from whom Dickens drew the character of Sergeant Buzfuz, counsel for the plaintiff in the famous suit of ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... was the late Charles Dickens, who was travelling to London. He had with him the MS. (or proofs) of a tale he was then engaged upon, and in the preface to the work he mentioned the occurrence. He was most useful to the injured passengers, and with other gentlemen exerted himself greatly to alleviate their sufferings. We need ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... them; it was a situation full of poor human pathos. The emotions surging within these two hearts would have afforded an interesting study for the magical pen of Charles Dickens. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... why the dickens should it?" the other demanded, in a puzzled tone. "It was quite an ordinary case, in its ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... though we may talk sometimes of an educated palate and an acquired taste. The finer organs of sight and hearing are the chief mediums of humour, but the sense of touch might by education be rendered exquisitely sensitive, and Dickens mentions the case of a girl he met in Switzerland who was blind, deaf, and dumb, but who was constantly laughing. Among infants, also, where very slight complication is required, the sense of humour can be excited by touch. Thus ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... this was Tellson's bank and was Mr. Tellson in? As a schoolboy he had often kidded the aged cashier as to the close resemblance of these quarters to the little, gloomy, narrow affair described by author Dickens as being located at Temple Bar in the city of London. But the aged cashier's place was occupied by an alert young man who asked to be of service and Shirley could only inquire if ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... and epicurean. I 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
... they admire is smashed by the rude presence of facts. I have got somewhat beyond the stage of feeling enthusiastic admiration, yet there are two or three living men whom I should be sorry to see: I know I should never admire them so much any more. I never saw Mr. Dickens: I don't want to see him. Let us leave Yarrow unvisited: our sweet ideal is fairer than the fairest fact. No hero is a hero to his valet: and it may be questioned whether any clergyman is a saint to his beadle. Yet the hero may be a true ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... if grandpapa would let me give a lecture on geology, or a reading from Dickens, old Prudence Blake would go about saying it hadn't done nothing for her ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... two will serve to show what manner of men these Grants were, and that Dickens, in his Brothers Cheeryble, has been guilty of no exaggeration. Many years ago, a warehouseman published an exceedingly scurrilous pamphlet against the firm of Grant Brothers, holding up the elder partner to ridicule as "Billy Button." William was informed by some "kind friend," of the existence ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... significance of facts. And imagination is the alembic that discovers the significance of the facts. A thousand men of England knew the facts touching the life and education of the children of that country, but the facts remained mere facts until the imagination of Dickens interpreted them and thus emancipated childhood from the thralldom of ignorance and cruelty. A thousand men knew the fact touching the steam that issues from the tea-kettle, but not until Watts discovered the significance of the fact did the tea-kettle become the ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... 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 the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... occurred to him that it would be well to go upstairs and pack his own trunk before the workmen got to asking questions. He carried his set of Dickens upstairs, not without interrogation, and stored the volumes away at the bottom of his trunk. So few were his individual belongings that he was hard put to fill the trays compactly enough to prevent the shifting of the contents. ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... On the other hand, if I don't happen to meet anyone, I can pry about the place, and I should say that I am just as likely to be able to rob a hen-roost as you or Jules. You stay here, and when I whistle, answer, for otherwise it will be a dickens of a job to ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... the Treasure presented her account book to Mr. Salisbury. There was always a small balance, sometimes five dollars, sometimes one, but Justine evidently had well digested Dickens' famous formula for ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... told, as everybody is supposed to know its contents from Dickens' famous fairy-tale. That it is less pretty than the original, is not Mr. Willner's fault, who did his best to endue it with dramatic strength, and to make it more effective, an elevation to which the tale never aspired, its poetic simplicity ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... were singing; and there were innumerable fair girls going by, about whom one might have made romances if one had not known better. Our friend pointed out to us the "pink jail" in which Dickens lived while at Genoa; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland the villa, called Il Paradiso, which Byron had occupied. I dare say this Genoese joke is already in print: That the Devil reentered Paradise when Byron took this villa. Though, in loveliest ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... justly 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. As an author he is to Hawthorne what a peony is ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... which were not those of the time. I have omitted both.... I knew the great Victorian authors. Thackeray I loved: Vanity Fair delighted me, and Esmond was obviously a great work of art; the giant charmed me by his kindness to me as a boy. But Dickens was to me a sea-captain with a taste for melodrama, and the author of Pickwick. It is only in old age that I have learnt that there was real beauty and charm in David Copperfield. So, too, Mill ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... Its great size probably proved fatal to its preservation in its complete form, or at least contributed to that end, for it has been estimated that it ran from six hundred to nine hundred pages, being longer, therefore, than the average novel of Dickens and Scott. Consequently we are not dealing with a bit of ephemeral literature, but with an elaborate composition of a high degree of excellence, behind which we should expect to find a long line of development. ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... used to come every day from Tewkesminster; but I had a few lessons from Mother as well, in drawing, and Greek history, and English literature. We used to read books aloud in the evenings—Shakespeare, or Dickens, or sometimes Tennyson or Wordsworth. We got through a tremendous amount of poetry in the winter, when it was dark early, and we had nothing else to do, except sit by the fire. We read all Marmion and ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... know how one gets on here? By the brilliance of genius or the adroitness of corruption one must enter the mass of men like a cannon-ball, or slip into it like the plague. Honesty is of no use." Having a tempter about him of Vautrin's calibre, strong, undauntable, as humorous as Dickens' Jingle, but infinitely more unscrupulous and dangerous, Rastignac is gained over, in spite of his first repulsion. The nursing and burying of Pere Goriot are his last acts of charity accorded to the claims of his higher nature, and even ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... in the capacity for aesthetic enjoyment of mountain scenery which exclude some minds which we should expect to find amongst the devotees and include others for whom we might look amongst the scoffers. Dickens was profoundly affected by the mountain-presence. His letters show the true rapture. Of the scenery of the St. Gothard he writes: "Oh God! what a beautiful country it is. How poor and shrunken, beside it, is Italy in its brightest aspect!" He ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli—a fact which shows that into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is shoveled every year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic literature, and the same is there digested and disposed of in a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of 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
... lunatics to that Court which Dickens describes as having its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, its worn-out lunatic in every mad-house, and its dead in every churchyard, we must briefly speak, and in many respects speak favourably. It may have been true that "the Court of Chancery gives ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... "What the dickens did you take this here for?" he cried. "It's a blooming wash-out,[1] and was never any good. Old as an unpaid bill and worn bell-mouth it is, and nobody ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... "Who the dickens cares what the Kings think?" he roared, perfectly aghast at the way she took it. "Who are the Kings? Tell me ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... told me the other day she was going to take advantage of woman's privilege, this year, and choose her own escort for the dance. Then she asked me if I knew whether you were spoke for, and when I told her yuh wasn't, she wanted to know if I'd bring a note over. But I was in a dickens of a hurry, and couldn't wait for it; anyhow, I was headed ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... astonishing with what ease and hilarity the English walk. To an American it seems a kind of infatuation. When Dickens was in this country, I imagine the aspirants to the honor of a walk with him were not numerous. In a pedestrian tour of England by an American, I read that, "after breakfast with the Independent ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... in a hurry, they would not record these hurriedly gleaned facts with such an appearance of infallibility, or, rather, they might be induced to try a second rush across the Atlantic before attempting that first rush into print. Let them remember that even the genius of Dickens was not proof against such error, and that a subsequent visit to the States caused no small amount of alteration in his impressions of America. This second visit should be a rule with every man who wishes to read aright, for his own benefit, or for that of others, the ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... we dare ask—of divine or statesman, poet or warrior, musician or engineer—of Dryden or of Handel—of Isaac Watts or of Charles Dickens—but why go on with the splendid diversities of the splendid catalogue?—What was your work? Did we admire you for it? Did we love you for it? And why? Because you made us in some way or other better men. Because ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... present blessings, of which every man has many: not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.—Charles Dickens. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... have charge of the picture gallery there, and that the whole interior is to become virtually a large cafe, when—it is hoped—the glass monster may at last "pay." Concerning which beautiful consummation of Mr. Dickens's "Fairyland" (see my pamphlet[5] on the opening of the so-called "palace"), be it here at once noted, that all idea of any "payment," in that sense, must be utterly and scornfully abjured on the foundation stone of every National ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... about success before talking of the easy ways that lead to failure. And by success here is meant no glorious triumph; the laurels are not in our thoughts, nor the enormous opulence (about a fourth of a fortunate barrister's gains) which falls in the lap of a Dickens or a Trollope. Faint and fleeting praise, a crown with as many prickles as roses, a modest hardly-gained competence, a good deal of envy, a great deal of gossip—these are the rewards of genius which constitute a modern literary success. Not to reach the moderate ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... we had an engagement at two places—at a Highland School dinner, and at Mr. Charles Dickens's. I felt myself too much exhausted for both, and so it was concluded that I should go to neither, but try a little quiet drive into the country, and an early retirement, as the most prudent termination ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... about them," she said—"Walter Scott was popular and made money,—Charles Dickens was popular and made money—Thackeray was popular and made money—Shakespeare himself seemed to have had the one principal aim of making sufficient money enough to live comfortably in his native town, and he was 'popular' ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... 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 ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer |
