"Dickens" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Evidently it had been rehearsed and as he recited it, in swift asides, his wife prompted him; but to note the effect he was making, she kept her eyes upon me. Having first compared my name, fame, and novels with those of Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, and Archibald Clavering Gunter, and to the disadvantage of those gentlemen, Farrell said the similarity of our names often had been commented upon, and that when from my letter he had learned our families ...
— The Log of The "Jolly Polly" • Richard Harding Davis
... mere prodigy of his speculations, began 'to spread himself into the minds of thousands'—including in no unimportant degree the mind of Emerson himself.[6] Literary criticism counted for something in the universal thaw, and even the genial humanity of Dickens helped to break up the indurations of old theology. Most powerful of all was the indirect influence of science. Geology disclosed law in an unsuspected region, and astronomy caused men to apprehend that 'as the earth is not the centre of the Universe, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... sake, leave off winking, Bingo! It's a habit that dates back to the era when women wore ringlets and white book-muslin, and men sported shaggy white beaver hats and pegtop trousers, and all the world read the novels of Lever and Dickens." ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... in it which cannot be traced more or less directly to a prototype in the works of Wagner, and it need scarcely be said that Goldmark does not improve upon his model In 'Das Heimchen am Herd' (1896), the libretto of which is founded upon Dickens's famous story 'The Cricket on the Hearth,' Goldmark seems to have tried to emulate the success of Humperdinck's 'Haensel und Gretel,' There are suggestions in it, too, of the influence of Smetana who dawned upon the Viennese horizon in 1890. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... and composition if we mention that 'Un remords, Tony, and Constance' were crowned by the French Academy, and 'Jacqueline' in 1893. Madame Bentzon is likewise the translator of Aldrich, Bret Harte, Dickens, and Ouida. Some of her critical works are 'Litterature et Moeurs etrangeres', 1882, and ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... "Then why the dickens do you want it to get about? Surely the best thing you can do is to dry up and say ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... could imagine you were reading Dickens," said Lucile, her eyes bright with the idea. "Why, that little shop might almost be ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... the dickens may that be to do with you?" he inquired. "And who may you be to walk aboard my ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... which could be folded into an overcoat pocket, for ten thousand dollars; a set of five "art fans," each blade painted by a famous artist and costing forty-three thousand dollars; a crystal cup for eighty thousand; an edition de luxe of the works of Dickens for a hundred thousand; a ruby, the size of a pigeon's egg, for three hundred thousand. In some of these great New York palaces there were fountains which cost a hundred dollars a minute to run; and in the harbour there were yachts which cost twenty ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... Landport, now a great town, but then a little suburb of Portsmouth, or Portsea, lying half a mile outside of the town walls. The date of his birth was Friday, February 7, 1812. His father was John Dickens, a clerk in the navy pay-office, and at that time attached to the Portsmouth dockyard. The familiarity which the novelist shows with sea-ports and sailors is not, however, due to his birthplace, because his father, in the year 1814, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Dickens tells of a character whose unworthy life had apparently extinguished the divine spark, and yet, down deep within her, at the end of a tortuous passage, there was a door, and over this door was the word womanhood. ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... some thing that should bear directly on the welfare of the people, especially of the poor around him. It was an impulse similar to that which inspired Oliver Twist, but Carlyle's remedies were widely different from those of Dickens. Not merely more kindness and sympathy, but paternal government, supplying work to the idle inmates of the workhouse, and insisting, by force if need be, on it being done, was his panacea. It had been Abbot Samson's way in his strong government of the Monastery ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... bomb business at the cottage. You see, it leaked out. When the attempt to blow up the place was reported, the men naturally asked what the dickens the scamps wanted to blow up a crowd of sightseers for, and then it came out that you came here with Lieutenant Gordon, ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... realist and the idealist which Dickens possessed to a remarkable degree, together with his naturally jovial attitude toward life in general, seem to have given him a remarkably happy feeling toward Christmas, though the privations and hardships of his boyhood could have ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... talking of policy, they could not play a better stroke than by listening to you, and it need by no means influence their action. TENEZ, you know what a French post office or railway official is? That is the diplomatic card to the life. Dickens is ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... literary clubs of London gave him an opportunity to make the acquaintance of the literary guild. He was present at the dinner given to Charles Dickens before the departure of that author to the United States, at which nearly every notable ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... Mulberry Bend Park may well thank the old Market Street church that the Cow Bay, Bandit's Roost, the Old Brewery and Cut Throat Alley are things of the past, and that the Five Points are known to this later day only as a name. No second Charles Dickens will cross the ocean to tell us that "all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... it ran, "what the dickens do you mean by it? I'm in an awful hole down here; I have to go on tick, and the parties on the spot don't cotton to the idea; they couldn't, because it is so plain I'm in a stait of Destitution. I've got ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ladies, who had read everything of Dickens and Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and occasionally, perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have let alone. One of the talking young ladies of this set ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... not Bishop Heber had been taken as a model. Not that any single comparison of the kind can convey the least idea of the complex idiosyncrasy of such a work. There is a substratum of Guide Book and Gil Blas, no doubt, but there are unmistakable streaks of Defoe, of Dumas, and of Dickens, with all his native prejudices and insular predilections strong upon him. A narrative so wide awake amidst a vagrant population of questionable morals and alien race suggests an affinity with Hajji Baba (a close kinsman, we conceive, of the Borrovian picaro). But, above ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... the captain is noteworthy in constituting, with Ralph Bigod (see page 27), a sketch (possibly unknown to Dickens) for ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... 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 feyther; how the beast whines and waggles his stump o' tail!—It's some ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... is careful to mingle instruction with entertainment; and the humorous touches, especially in the sketch of John Holl, the Westminster dustman, Dickens himself could hardly ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... curious. It may be doubted whether we can in this country show anything so bad as the record furnished by Dickens in describing some of ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... clothesline. More than once, with whistles and coaxings and pats, he fed the dog! He even thought up games of his own. "Now ye think I'm comin' in alone," he said one morning. "That's because ye see nobody else. But, ho-ho! What deceivin'! For, shure, right here in me pocket I've got a friend—Mr. Charles Dickens!" ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... natural transition the mental tumult thus roused led to a more intense self-consciousness than any he had yet known. In measuring himself with the world of 'Shirley' or of Dickens, he began to realise the problem of his own life with a singular keenness and clearness. Then—last of all—the record of Franklin's life,—of the steady rise of the ill-treated printer's devil to knowledge and power—filled him with an urging and concentrating ambition, and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "She isn't posing," he thought, "but she ought to be painted. She ought always to be painted, each time one sees her, for everything about her suggests a portrait. That blue ribbon in her hair is fairly distracting! What the dickens is the reason one wants to look at her all the time! ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long, long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time, of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out."—DICKENS. ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... appeal to his better nature. "I don't know who the dickens you are. You may be the three wise men of Gotham who went to sea in a bowl rolled into one, for all I know. You may be any old thing. I don't give a tinker's cuss what you are. Under ordinary circumstances I've no doubt I should ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... a lost corner anywhere in this planet where English is spoken (or French) in which The Martian won't be bought and treasured and spelt over and over again like a novel by Dickens or Scott (or Dumas)—for Josselin's dear sake! What a fortune my publishers would make if I were not a man of business and they were not the best and most generous publishers in the world! And all Josselin's publishers—French, English, German, and ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... and his "History of the Century of 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 ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... 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
... had another introduction, through the kindness of Mr. Chippendale, which proved of great service to me. It was to the Messrs. Grant, the famous "Brothers Cheeryble" of Dickens. I was taken to their counting-house in Cannon Street, where I was introduced to Daniel Grant. Although business was at its full height, he gave me a cordial reception. But, to save time, he invited me to come after the Exchange was over ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... the dickens can say so?" ejaculated the sailor in a rage, and pulling out his purse and opening it he threw all its contents on the table. A heap of gold rolled on the oaken surface, and with loud shouting the guests around the table ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... the thing that made me homesick for London? Household Words. The excitement in the 'sixties over each new Dickens can be understood only by people who experienced it at the time. Boys used to sell Household Words in the streets, and they were often pursued by an eager crowd, for all the world as if they were carrying ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... Little Prudy Stories would be elected Aunty-laureate if the children had an opportunity, for the wonderful books she writes for their amusement. She is the Dickens of the nursery, and we do not hesitate to say develops the rarest sort of genius in the specialty of depicting smart ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... there was no one who was seen more frequently on the streets of Cambridge. He walked with a springy step and a very slight swing of the shoulders, which showed that he enjoyed it. He may not have walked such long distances as Hawthorne, or so rapidly as Dickens, but he was ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... work of Garrick. Sheridan, it may be noted, supplied a prologue to Savage's tragedy of "Sir Thomas Overbury," on the occasion of its revival at Covent Garden, thirty-four years after the death of its author. Among the last of the prologues was one written by Mr. Charles Dickens to Dr. Westland Marston's poetic drama, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... is particularly interesting as illustrating the leaning of Dickens's mind toward the spiritualistic and mystical fancies current in his time, and the counterbalance of his ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... understand 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 like a couple ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... Jo to-night; Josephine, her name is. She's in bed, and will be for a week or so, most likely. You've just got to come, Ford. Kate'll be down here after you herself, if I go back without you—and she'll give me the dickens into the bargain. I want you to get acquainted with my kid—Buddy. He's down in the river field with the boys, but he'll be back directly. Greatest kid you ever saw, Ford! Only seven, and he can ride like a son-of-a-gun, and wears chaps and spurs, and can sling a loop pretty ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... Rabelais Dickens Thomas Hardy Dante Goethe Walter Pater Shakespeare Matthew Arnold Dostoievsky El Greco Shelley Edgar Allan Poe Milton Keats Walt ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... 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. ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... will be found several of the most popular of the creations of Dickens, notably, The Marchioness, Little Nell, Jenny Wren, and Florence Dombey, and it is hoped that in this presentation as simple stories of girlhood, their classic form and beauty may arouse in the young people of our day a new interest in the ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... possible for me to have entered this building without encountering some sign—either sight or sound—of it. No; that was just a yarn, a ruse to get me to come here willingly. Now, I wonder what the dickens they want with me, and what they intend to do with me now that they have me. Nothing very serious, I expect; for I am the Inca, and they would never dare to lay violent hands upon the Inca; that amounts to sacrilege of the very worst kind. Yes; no doubt. And yet I am by no means certain ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... by Rose Terry Cooke. Stories of Saddle-Bag Preachers, by H.L. Winckley. My First Visit to a Newspaper Office, by Murat Halstead. Queen Victoria's Household and Drawing-Rooms, by H.W. Lucy. Child Friendships of Charles Dickens, by his Daughter, Mamie Dickens. Our Herbariums; Adventures in Collecting Them, by A Young Lady. My Pine-Apple Farm, with incidents of Florida Life, by C.H. Pattee. Bigwigs of the English Bench and Bar, by a London Barrister, W.L. Woodroffe. At School ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... 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 savours ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... "Why the dickens not?" cried the other, flinging out his hands. "Look here. I said last night that we had them by holding the nine entrances. Well, I was wrong. We should have had them but for a singular event—the lamps went out. But for that it was certain. ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... and then the Uncle took us all over the house, which is the most comfortable one I have ever been in. There is a beautiful portrait of Mother in Father's sitting-room. The Uncle must be very rich indeed. This ending is like what happens in Dickens's books; but I think it was much jollier to happen like a book, and it shows what a nice man the Uncle is, the way he ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... said the Captain, 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
... I'm sorry, for he was a game, clean scrapper, and I know, for I've had several brushes with him. The Huns came over here last night and dropped sixty bombs, killing people and wounding I don't know how many. Several of the bombs hit about 300 meters from here and our beds shook like the dickens. ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... man of weak fibre, who allowed himself to sponge upon his friends, such as Talfourd, Haydon, and Shelley. Though Dickens denied ('All the Year Round', Dec. 24, 1859) that "Harold Skimpole" was intended for Hunt, the picture was recognized as a portrait. On the other hand, Hunt was a man of kindly and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... piano. We talk of books; and it is wonderful to me to find how Margaret's tastes and opinions coincide with mine. Miss Carpenter was stupid about books, and used to call Carlyle nonsensical; and never really enjoyed Dickens half as much as she pretended. I have lent Margaret some of my books; and a little shower of withered rose-leaves dropped from the pages of 'Wilhelm Meister,' after she had returned me the volume. I have put them in an envelope, and sealed it. I may ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... or "Gulliver's Travels" or "Swiss Family Robinson" were children's books; they were not so treated by my mother, and I remember, as a small boy, going up to Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, with divine eagerness, to buy the latest number of a Dickens serial. I think the name of the shop—the shop of Paradise—which sold these books was called Ashburnham's. It may be asked how the episode in "Adam Bede" of Hetty and that of "little Em'ly" in Dickens ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... and Mrs. Selldon talked to an empty-headed but loquacious man on her left, and racked her brains for something to say to the alarmingly silent author on her right. She remembered hearing that Charles Dickens would often sit silent through the whole of dinner, observing quietly those about him, but that at dessert he would suddenly come to life and keep the whole table in roars of laughter. She feared that Mr. Shrewsbury meant to imitate the great novelist in the ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... himself, the rage with destiny, the bitter enmity against a world in which he was no longer to exist. Only Deleah felt in her heart the sorrow of it all—Deleah who was a reader of Thackeray, of Trollope, of Dickens, of Tennyson; whose eyes had wept for imaginary woes before these bitter drops had been wrung from them for her own; who had learnt that tears were not the only signs of an anguished heart; and knew that the love of position, of home, of a ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... as peacemaker in our civil troubles, seems likely to end by being their battleground; as Mr. Pickwick, interfering between the belligerent rival editors, only brought upon his own head the united concussion of their carpet-bags. And as Dickens declares that the warriors engaged far more eagerly in that mimic strife, on discovering that all blows were to be received by deputy, so there is evidently an increased willingness to deal hard knocks on both sides, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... see this sketch till it's finished," said Cromer, honestly. "It's going to be an awfully pretty bit, but unfinished, it looks like the dickens. Let me sketch you, Miss Fairfield, ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... Going to be the dickens to pay, I reckon. The bally old lake's rising like fun. Looks like the outlet must have got stopped up somehow. You're sure going to have to move your tents ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... is perfectly safe just to write for bulbs which are to be bedded. La Grandesse is a beautiful white; King of the Blues speaks for itself and the Sarah Bernhardt is a salmon pink. These do well inside, too. Charles Dickens is a fine rose colour, Prince of Wales, violet, and L'Innocence, a fine white. These are good for inside planting. Some may like the smaller Roman hyacinths, which do splendidly indoors. Very good hyacinths are bought for ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... keep from untwisting the morning-glory, only be willing to let the sunshine do it! Dickens said real children went out with powder and top-boots; and yet the children of Dickens's time were simple buds compared with the full-blown miracles of conventionality ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... it all, my good woman!" he exclaimed in English, "don't talk so fast. I only know a smattering of your tongue.—She puzzles me, my dear. It's all tongue.—Who the British Dickens wants to know that your little one is quite well again and strong, at a time ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... are!" said Katy. "I feel as if I were eating rounds cut from an old ironing-blanket and buttered! Dear me! what did Dickens mean by making such a fuss about them, I wonder? And I don't care for gooseberry jam, either; it isn't half as good as the jams we have at home. Books are ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... had by this time become so insistent that Riley could no longer resist it, although modesty and shyness fought the battle for privacy. He told briefly and in his own inimitable fashion of these trying experiences. "In boyhood I had been vividly impressed with Dickens' success in reading from his own works and dreamed that some day I might follow his example. At first I read at Sunday- school entertainments and later, on special occasions such as Memorial Days and Fourth of Julys. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... 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 ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... us have heard of crost fights, And certain gains, by certain lost fights; I rather fancies that its news, How in a mill, both men should lose; [1] For vere the odds are thus made even, It plays the dickens with the steven: [2] Besides, against all rule they're sinning, Vere neither has no chance of vinning. ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... has been 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 The Lazy Tour they were, so to speak, like the gentleman seated one day at the organ, "weary ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... the dickens did he get the encouragement?" cried Carington fretfully. "Psha! he has not put ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... there by himself, counting piles of pelf Of a counterfeit gamboge hue. He's wizened and dried like old Arthur Gride, That the novelist DICKENS drew. In the midst of his heaps, He conveniently sleeps With his glass ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... precocious boyhood, with its eager response to the intellectual stimulation of cultured parents; young Bret Harte assimilated Greek with amazing facility; devoured voraciously the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Irving, Froissart, Cervantes, Fielding; and, with creditable success, attempted various forms of composition. Then, compelled by economic necessity, he left school at thirteen, and for three years worked first in a lawyer's office, and then ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... 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 ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... set for recitation by the first class in arithmetic was often and often monopolized by a hold-over of the first class in reading, while Miss Floretta, artfully spurred by questions asked by the older scholars, rhapsodized on the beauties of James Fenimore Cooper's "Uncas," or Dickens' "Little Nell," or Scott's "Ellen." Some of us antiques, then tow-headed little shavers in the front seats, can still remember Miss Floretta's ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... dumb, and blind child, born in New Hampshire, U.S.; noted for the surprising development of intellectual faculty notwithstanding these drawbacks; Dickens gives an account of her in his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... was quite an extensive library, especially on Arctic and Antarctic topics, but as it was in the Commander's cabin it was not heavily patronized. In my own cabin I had Dickens' "Bleak House," Kipling's "Barrack Room Ballads," and the poems of Thomas Hood; also a copy of the Holy Bible, which had been given to me by a dear old lady in Brooklyn, N. Y. I also had Peary's books, "Northward Over the Great Ice," and ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... after he had made himself comfortable the place seemed smaller. When half-way through the "spout," coming in, he gave a grunt which I took to be one of appreciation. Then Whetter came in. He is of a candid disposition: "Ho, ho, laddie, what the dickens have you ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... idea?" I asked. "Big idea is right, Harry," he grinned. "Just thought I would beat you to it. Had a dickens of a time with Dan Clark, of the engineering department. Told him I wanted to study philosophy. The old boy put up a beautiful holler. Couldn't understand what an engineer would want with psychology or ethics. Neither ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... "What the dickens," said I to myself, "can a hut be doing here?" Even as I said it the door of the hut opened, and there limped out of it a white man clothed in skins, and with an enormous black beard. I thought that ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... head. "Not them—I knew about them! But Dunn and Collins cleared out the day you left, and I thought——" he broke off irrelevantly. "What the dickens possessed you to take Paulette with you that night? She might have been killed—I heard you'd the dog's own trouble on ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... 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. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... know—that's the dickens of it. Maybe none, and then again, maybe a lot. You see, we don't know who or what we are up against. The only thing we know is that they've got us beat a hundred ways, and we've got to act accordingly. We've got to chance it sometime, though, if we can ever get away, so we might as well do ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... overcome Don Quixote, tired, and, finally, turning away from him, with pleasure heard Robinson Crusoe through, and wept with especial copiousness over the scene of his meeting with his relatives. She liked Dickens, and very easily grasped his radiant humour; but the features of English manners were foreign to her and incomprehensible. They also read Chekhov more than once, and Liubka very freely, without difficulty, penetrated ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... half-dozen authors are now read with the interest and glow which their works called out a hundred years ago. Even the novels of Sir Walter, although to be found in every library, kindle but little enthusiasm compared with that excited by the masterpieces of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and of the favorites of the passing day. Why is this? Will these later lights also cease to burn? Will they too pass away? Is this age so much advanced that what pleased our grandfathers and grandmothers has no charm for ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... forthcoming, he employed his spare time in looking about the room. There was dust everywhere, and frayed rugs and faded hangings. But there were a number of busts which were really a delight to the eye: of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Victor Hugo, of Dickens and of others. And there were book cases filled to overflowing with books—all dust-covered, as if they had ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... Drake sharply, as this peculiar-looking individual reached the deck and stood staring round him, "what the dickens d'ye want? Who ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... always be seeking. There is no surer indication of shallowness than the desire to read only about pleasant subjects and characters and events. It is akin to the habit of ignoring the existence of everything disagreeable in life, which Dickens has satirized in his character, Mr. Podsnap. And "Podsnappery" exists among women even more than among men, because of their more sensitive emotional nature. If women are to join with men in making the world better, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... sad enough to see how often this rule is violated. There are fashions of writing. Mr. Dickens, in his wonderful use of exaggerated language, introduced one. And now you can hardly read the court report in a village paper but you find that the ill-bred boy who makes up what he calls its "locals" thinks it is funny to write in such a ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... the rack is not, though probably no one would care to try. There were holidays; there was a large circle of hospitable family friends, and strangers were only too anxious to welcome (and perhaps to propitiate) Her Majesty's Inspector. The agreeable anomalies of the British legal system (which, let Dickens and other grumblers say what they like, have made many good people happy and only a few miserable) allowed Mr Arnold for many years to act (sometimes while simultaneously inspecting) as his father-in-law's Marshal ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... little tell-tale as the rest. A fine set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; histories of all sorts, but only the best in every case; a little standard poetry; the great English novelists—Dickens much worn, Meredith's early works, the unquenchable Charles Reade, who has nursed so many fretful convalescents back to the harness; two or three fine editions of Shakespeare, one, a half-dozen small green volumes, worn ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... died, we have come to think ourselves altogether too fine and too busy to cultivate the delightful art of correspondence. Dickens seems to have been almost the last man among us who gave his mind to letter-writing; and his letters contain some of his very best work, for he plunged into his subject with that high-spirited abandonment which we see in "Pickwick," and the full geniality ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... always at a disadvantage among folk of talent. Aboard ship you can read and think more than at a university. I've got a parcel for you to take when you go again. Hakluyt's Voyages and a good Marco Polo. And the new book of Mr. Dickens, 'The Haunted Man.' And there's a great new writer you'll not want to miss, by name of Thackeray." And there'd be the Bank of England note, "for fear you might be needing it on a special occasion, and not having it, and feeling bad." Dear Uncle Robin! ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... afterwards. But the neighbourhood of Covent Garden had greater wonders! Two or three times a week, walking, black bag in hand, from Charing Cross Station to the office of All the Year Round in Wellington Street, came the good, the only Dickens! From that good Genie the poor straggler from Fairyland got solid help and sympathy. Few can realise now what Dickens was then to London. His humour filled its literature like broad sunlight; the Gospel of Plum-pudding warmed every poor ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 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 ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... Dick; 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 ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... man, writhed silently. That was the worst of these Americans! Always getting divorced and causing unpleasantness. How was a fellow to know? Why hadn't whoever it was who first introduced them—he couldn't remember who the dickens it was—told him about this? He had supposed she was just the ordinary American woman doing Europe with an affectionate dollar-dispensing husband ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... not the only Idiot in fiction who is able to teach the wise, as every one knows who remembers his "David Copperfield." How Betsy Trotwood would have loved Dostoevski's hero! Dickens and Dostoevski were perhaps the biggest-hearted of all novelists, and their respect for children and harmless men is notable. The sacredness of mad folk is a ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... look at the country stock And drink some milk from a dairy crock; Look at the pigs and admire the chickens, And try to forget it's hot as the dickens. ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... I remember Dickens notices the same truth, describing himself as lying drowsily on the barge deck, looking not at, but through the sky. And if you look intensely at the pure blue of a serene sky, you will see that there is a variety and fulness in ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... to those 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 chapter of ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... "Why the dickens do you want to force the tone?" said I, in tart accents. "It is just there we disagree," I yelled, for I was getting mad. "In your mad quest of tone you destroy the most characteristic quality of the pianoforte—I ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... to him. He was a gruff old gentleman, and seemingly anxious to have Froude become an eligible, and I judged from the rather fierce manner in which he handled a club he had in his hand, that there were one or two other men of prominence still living he was anxious to meet. Dickens, too, was desirous of a two-minute interview with certain of his at present purely mortal critics; and, between you and me, if the wink that Bacon gave Shakespeare when I spoke of Ignatius Donnelly meant anything, the famous cryptogrammarian will do well to drink a bottle ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... mountaineers made up this amazing population—a population in which libraries were of small value, a tobacco-chewing, ceaselessly spitting unkempt horde, whose stage of culture was almost precisely that which Dickens and other travelers from the old world had found in the Central ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... teachers are miserably overtaxed. But the schools are graded, everything cut and dried, the curriculum made by state or county board; and, like the tyrant's bedstead, those too long must be cut off, and those too short must be stretched. All must fit the bedstead. That great story-teller, Charles Dickens, tells the story exactly in his picture of Dr. Blimmer's system of teaching. That poor babe, Paul Dombey, might as well have been fed to an insatiable ogre as to have been placed in the hands of that ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... 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 ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... chiffons sous l'eventail, ou ecoutaient les cantilenes d'un chanteur exotique pendant que les jeunes gens leur chuchotaient des galanteries a l'oreille." This last is really worthy of the feeblest member of our "plated silver fork school" between the time of Scott and Miss Austen and that of Dickens and Thackeray. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... that Will gave them fair 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 ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... indulged in an unexplained digression at this point. He discovered literature and became acquainted with the works of one Charles Dickens, of whose genius he made himself the sounding trumpet- call for the ears ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... 156; unintentionally &c. adj.; unwittingly. en passant[Fr], by the way, incidentally; as it may happen; at random, at a venture, at haphazard. Phr. acierta errando[Lat]; dextro tempore[Lat]; "fearful concatenation of circumstances" [D. Webster]; "fortuitous combination of circumstances" [Dickens]; le jeu est le fils d'avarice et le pere du desespoir[Fr]; "the happy combination of fortuitous circumstances" [Scott]; "the fortuitous or casual concourse of atoms" [Bentley]; "God does not play dice ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... streets their education is of that character which tends to make them quick, bright, smart and skillful in all things, and, when added to natural gifts of intelligence, render them very dangerous as thieves or thieves' assistants. Readers of Charles Dickens will recall, in this connection, the use to which burglar Bill Sykes applied little ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... Chatterton wanted 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
... 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 more excitin'." ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... irrespective of mere party grounds. Its Essays, Poems, and Tales will be furnished by the ablest writers of both Continents. A new Novel, by Mr. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, entitled "QUITE ALONE," will, by special arrangement with the Author, appear in the WEEKLY simultaneously with its publication in Mr. DICKENS'S "All the Year Round." The Publishers will see to it that the current Volume shall justify the favorable opinions expressed by the loyal Press upon the ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... appeared in the Standard, September 10th, 1879, and as it relates to the subject I have in hand I quote it in full:—"Not only in his 'Uncommercial Traveller,' but in many other scattered passages of his works, Dickens, who for many years lived in Kent, has described the intolerable nuisance inflicted by tramps upon residents in the home counties, and has sketched the natural history of the sturdy vagabond who infests our roads and highways ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Coopers and Irvings of the States; so that English booksellers have now a perfect right to treat American authors as American booksellers have long been in the habit of serving English authors. And there is something just in this lex talionis. If Dickens, may be reprinted and sold for a shilling in New York, why may not Cooper be reprinted and sold for a shilling in London? At all events, the reprisal system will possibly incline our Yankee neighbors to listen to reason, and to favor the embassy which Mr. James, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... any one 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 hero, and the clergyman a very excellent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... comment, but disposed of the tea and bread in a very short space of time. He felt ready to join in with Oliver, in Dickens's immortal story, when he asked for "more." But he knew it ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger
... said, quoting "The Virginian," "not so damned funny either. But how the dickens did you know what I was going ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... then came two large volumes on Leonardo da Vinci. Raising his eyes, the parson read through the titles: Browning's works; Tennyson in a cheap seven-and-six edition; Swinburne, Pater, Rossetti, Morris, two novels by Rhoda Broughton, Dickens, Thackeray, Fielding, and Smollett; the complete works of Balzac, Gautier's Emaux et Camees, Salammbo, L'Assommoir; Carlyle, Newman, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... 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 her understand I was so ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... off in Mother Goose's train, which had lingered on the steps to see the Dickens reception, with which the procession of characters in costume had closed. At this moment they were dancing round the barberry bush, in a corner of the balcony in Mother Goose's quarters, their feather-dusters ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... Fringed Gentian William Cullen Bryant Goldenrod Elaine Goodale Eastman Lessons from the Gorse Elizabeth Barrett Browning The Voice of The Grass Sarah Roberts Boyle A Song the Grass Sings Charles G. Blanden The Wild Honeysuckle Philip Freneau The Ivy Green Charles Dickens Yellow Jessamine Constance Fenimore Woolson Knapweed Arthur Christopher Benson Moly Edith Matilda Thomas The Morning-Glory Florence Earle Coates The Mountain Heart's-Ease Bret Harte The Primrose Robert Herrick ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... feelings of our nature. The Poet's sporting with them is the free, loving, whole-hearted play of a truly great, generous, simple, child-like soul. Compared to these genuine offspring of undeflowered genius, the ill-natured and cynical caricatures in which Dickens, for example, so often and so tediously indulges, seem the workmanship of quite another species of being. The part of Dogberry was often attempted to be imitated by other dramatists of Shakespeare's time; which shows ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... there a story written once about a fellow who created some sort of a machine man without any soul that raised the very dickens and all for him? Frank—Frankenstein?—I guess that was it. Well, I've created a Frankenstein creature—and I'm dead up against it to know what to ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... "Cecil,") a lady who quotes all tongues from the Chaldaean to Chickasaw, and is helped to her learning, "as needed," upon a systematic plan, by Mr. Beckford,—in all the crack novels, I say, from those of Bulwer and Dickens to those of Bulwer and Dickens to those of Turnapenny and Ainsworth, the two little Latin words cui bono are rendered "to what purpose?" or, (as if quo bono,) "to what good." Their true meaning, nevertheless, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... then,"—she ended, with a sigh, "I never was quite myself again—I think my nerves got a sort of shock such as the great novelist, Charles Dickens had when he was in the railway accident—you remember the tale in Forster's 'Life'? How the carriage hung over the edge of an embankment but did not actually fall,—and Dickens was clinging on to it all the time. He never got over it, and it was the remote cause ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... she did not say, and, I suppose, you will not be much mortified to hear that your name was not mentioned at all. So much for our learning. My sister was much disappointed the other day when, in expectation of a ghost story from Mr. Dickens, she only got a grotesque moral allegory; now, as she delights in a ghost and hates an ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... death, which occurred very suddenly at his residence. Gad's Hill, Kent, on June 9th, 1870. He left his latest work, The Mystery of Edwid Drood, unfinished, and it remains a fragment. It was not merely as a humorist, though that was his great distinguishing characteristic, that Dickens obtained such unexampled popularity. Be was a public instructor, a reformer and moralist. Whatever was good and amiable, bright and joyous in our nature, he loved, supported and augmented by his writings; whatever was false, hypocritical ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... 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' pen."—LITERARY WORLD. ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... of that second season several of Dickens's dramatized novels were played, and Christie earned fresh laurels. She loved those books, and seemed by instinct to understand and personate the humor and pathos of many of those grotesque creations. Believing ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... Dombey passed to the forcing-house of Dr. Blimber, Mrs. Blimber, Miss Blimber and Mr. Feeder, B.A., also at Brighton, where he met Mr. Toots. "The Doctor's," says Dickens, "was a mighty fine house, fronting the sea. Not a joyful style of house within, but quite the contrary. Sad-coloured curtains, whose proportions were spare and lean, hid themselves despondently behind the windows. The tables and chairs were put away in rows, like figures in a sum; ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... care to?" Then he raised his voice: "Tiger! Tiger! Where the dickens are you?" But Tiger, half a mile away, squatted sulkily on the lagoon's edge, fishing, and muttering to himself that there were too many white people in the ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... action that displayed a dainty slipper and ankle, in no wise lost upon him. "I always hit back myself," she continued. "I've no sympathy with the 'other cheek' theory. I hit twice as hard as the attacker if possible. If Aunt Emily were here, I should say I give a dickens of a smack; but as she isn't, it is not worth while." She came forward with a mischievous gleam in her eyes. "Poor dear Aunt Emily! I sometimes have her conscience very much on my mind; but there ... I can bear it." And her comical enunciation in the poor lady's ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... "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 which is said to be "better worth reading than all the Works of Colley ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... be a humanitarian; and every humanitarian should be an economist. Charles Dickens, writing in Eighteen Hundred Sixty, puts forth Scrooge, Carker and Bumball as economists. When Dickens wanted to picture ideal businessmen, he gave us the Cheeryble brothers—men with soft hearts, giving pennies to all beggars, shillings to poor widows, and coal and loaves of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... of Christmas stories Dickens gives us the very atmosphere of the season with all the contrasts that poverty and wealth, miserliness and charity, the past and the future can suggest. Though he had London in mind, any great industrial center would have served as well, for Dickens was thinking primarily of the relations ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... said Lilly. "Why the dickens doesn't he walk by himself, without wanting a woman always ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... war came the army correspondents. Dickens had previously introduced Martin Chuzzlewit to "our war correspondent, sir, Mr. Jefferson Brick," several years previously, but the warlike experiences of the redoubtable Mr. Brick were of a purely sedentary character, and his epistles ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... namesake," as he calls him, "Robert Burton, of melancholy and merry, of facete and juvenile memory." Of contemporary work he enjoyed most the poems of D. G. Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. John Payne and FitzGerald's Rubaiyat, and we find him praising Mr. Edmund Gosse's lyrics. Of novelists Dickens was his favourite. He called Darwin "our British Aristotle." Eothen [515] was "that book of books." He never forgave Carlyle for denouncing The Arabian Nights as "downright lies" and "unwholesome literature;" Miss Martineau, as an old maid, was, of course, also out of court. If she had written Shakespeare, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... dickens and daizeys! zoo it be, zure enow!—"My dear feyther, you will be surprized"—Zoo I be, he, he! What pretty writing, bean't it? all as straight as thof it were ploughed—"Surprized to hear, that in a few hours I shall embrace ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton
... urbanity when he wanted to impress a company, a caucus or a crowd. The Romist whom Orangemen admired, the Frenchman who made an intellectual hobby of British democracy, the poetic statesman who read Dickens and re-read in two languages Uncle Tom's Cabin and sometimes played the flute, and the Premier of a bilingual country who had a passion for the study of the war which emancipated the negro, was the kaleidoscopic enigma ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... very birds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human speech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to teach them. So with us individuals. Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical effects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to our humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us. But it is like Columbus's egg. "All can raise the flowers now, for all have got the seed." But if this be true of the individuals in the community, how can it be ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... know why all celebrated people who write books of travels begin by describing their days of sea-sickness. Dickens, George Combe, Fanny Kemble, Mrs. Stowe, Miss Bremer, and many others, have opened in like manner their valuable remarks on foreign countries. While intending to avail myself of their privilege and example, I would, nevertheless, suggest, for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... England than a Chief Justice in Massachusetts; yet the same abilities which carried the chance-transplanted Boston boy, Lyndhurst, to the woolsack, might, perhaps, had he remained in the land of his birth, have found no higher goal than the bench of the Supreme Court. Mr. Dickens laughed very fairly at the "remarkable men" of our small towns; but England is full of just such little-greatness, with the difference that one is proclaimed in the "Bungtown Tocsin" and the other in the "Times." We must get a new phrase, and say that Mr. Brown was immortal at the latest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... how frequently Dickens' characters and descriptions come into the memory of a stranger visiting London. No one, who has ever seen them, will forget the houses in Chancery. Situated as some of them are, in the busiest and most crowded parts of the city, and ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson |
