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Captain Marryat: Dickens

DICKENS IN G. K. Chesterton's searching study of Charles Dickens, he point out what an extraordinary difference there is between the popularity of Dickens and the popularity of the most eagerly read English writers of to-day. People read a Dickens story six times, says Mr. Chesterton, because they know it so well. If they can read a modern popular novel six times, it is only because they can forget it six times.

One reason for this difference is the vividness with which the people of Dickens stand out. There are dozens of characters in Dickens whom readers feel they know better than they do their most intimate friends. One has but to think of Dick Swiveller or Quilp in "The Old Curiosity Shop" to see them moving past. And there are others in this book and in all the novels who are so familiar that the mere mention of their names conjures them into life. Much as we like and are thrilled by the men and women who dare and love in the popular stories of to-day, there are none of them whom we should recognize as quickly if we saw them in the street as we would Micawber or Mrs. Gamp or Sam Weller or a host of others created more than half a century ago. It was the writer's imagination that has made his characters seem giants when they are placed beside the characters of later men. It is this imagination, "now humorous, now terrible, now simply grotesque," that Professor Saintsbury terms "of a quality which stands entirely by itself, or is approached at a distance, and with a difference, only by that of his great French contemporary, Balzac."