"Dickens" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... is humble,—thoroughly humble. Is this caricature? No. It is impossible to caricature Andrew Johnson when he mounts his high horse of humility and becomes a sort of cross between Uriah Heep and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. Indeed, it is only by quoting Dickens's description of the latter personage that we have anything which fairly matches the traits suggested by some statements in the President's speeches. "A big, loud man," says the humorist, "with a stare and a metallic laugh. A man ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... 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 ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... "Who the dickens has been butting into your affairs now?" demanded Nolan peevishly, and though the girls laughed, there was no laughter in his eyes and no smile on ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... sympathy for all human suffering, with the smile of understanding for everything truly human, also for all the limitations and follies of human nature, Reuter has worthily taken his place by the side of his model, Charles Dickens. It is questionable whether even Dickens ever created a character equal to the fine and excellent Uncle Braesig, who, in the opinion of competent critics, is the most successful humorous figure in all German ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... translated into French under the title of Une Idee Fantasque, and issued by the Bleriot Library, with a preface by M. Gounod. It has also appeared in Italian. In the Tauchnitz Collection it is bound in with No Thoroughfare, having been chosen by the late Charles Dickens as a pendant for his own story in a volume ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... Immature indeed she is, but it is with the immaturity which will not develop, which has nothing to do with length of years. To me, the failure here is absolute; she never comes to life. Every student of Browning knows of the enthusiasm which Dickens expressed for ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... 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
... cultivated and fine character of Dutch descent. His grandmother on his father's side was Catherine Brett. He had an elder brother and two younger sisters. The boys were voracious readers and began Shakespeare when six, adding Dickens at seven. Frank developed an early sense of humor, burlesquing the baldness of his primer and mimicking the recitations of some of his fellow pupils when he entered school. He was studious and very soon began to write. At eleven he sent a poem to a weekly ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... 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, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... justify the high place assigned to it. Ruskin wrote the story in 1841, at a "couple of sittings," though it was not published until ten years later. Speaking of it later in life, he said that it "was written to amuse a little girl; and being a fairly good imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with a little true Alpine feeling of my own, it has been rightly pleasing to nice children, and good for them. But it is totally valueless, for all that. I can no more write a story than compose a picture." The final statement may be taken for what it is worth, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... excited by his effort and danger, "because to myself I staked all my future on reaching you in that old hulk, and I won. Had it sunk, I had made up my mind to go with her, and, like Mr. Mantalini, in Dickens's last novel, 'become a body, a ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... History of the country this book is invaluable, inasmuch as it notices a great many events not mentioned by Bancroft, Hildreth, or Prescott. As a Novel it is unapproachable, for it contains several characters unknown to Cooper, Dickens, Marryatt, or Bulwer. As a Mythological Work it should be immediately secured, as it makes mention of a number of gods and deified worthies hitherto unknown to old Jupiter himself. As a Poem, its claims to ...
— Nothing to Say - A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing - to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' • QK Philander Doesticks
... long as he was more poetic than venerable he stood in perpetual rebellion against the motives, pursuits, and satisfactions of his time)—Wordsworth till he was forty-five, Byron all his short life, Newman, Carlyle, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin—among English writers those have proved themselves the dynamic people. There are many others, and many later; but we need recall only these few great names, far enough distant to be clearly visible. It was they who moved the country, shaking its torpor like successive ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... Danny De la Warr, Lord Devil's Dyke Dickens, Charles Dicker, The Dicul Ditchling Ditchling Beacon Donnington Dorking Duncton ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... a novel, and there are no bad ones in the world, except those you do not happen to like. Suppose a boy started with Robinson Crusoe and was scientifically and criminally steered by the hand of misguided "culture" to Scott and Dickens and Cooper and Hawthorne—all the classics, in fact, so that he would escape the vulgar thousands? Answer a straight question, ye old rooters between a thousand miles of muslin lids—would you have been willing to miss "The Gunmaker of Moscow" back yonder in the green days of say ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... Genevieve convulsed them by a dramatic representation of a stormy scene between herself and Madame Philippe; then Miss Evans's new evening frock, Miss Marlowe's incomprehensible taste in preferring Jane Austen to Dickens, Miss Langton's terrifying sarcasm, Miss Ashwell's sweet new sweater coat, all were discussed with an enormous amount ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... me as a very passable imitation of Dickens's pathetic writings, was a poser. In default of language, I looked Miss Sawley straight in the face, and attempted a substitute for a sigh. I was rewarded with ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... Where the dickens were my evening things? I had looked all over the place before I remembered that Jeeves must have taken them away to brush. To leap at the bell and ring it was, with me, the work of a moment. I had just rung it when there was a footstep outside, ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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, and ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... the 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, but became a care ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... come before the public by the same means, which have recently served also for the original exhibition of the most elaborate and brilliant Fictions, so that we are now receiving through them by almost every ship from Europe installments of works by Dickens, Bulwer, James, Croly, Lever, Reynolds, Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Ellis, and indeed nearly all the most eminent contemporary novelists. So complete is the change, that all mind, except the heaviest and least popular, is likely to flow hereafter through the Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Quarterly ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... to remember, DICKENS'S "Brothers Cheeryble." Well, Benjamin Goldfinch has all the milk of human kindness which characterised these philanthropic Gemini. As to moral characteristics, he is these two single gentlemen rolled into one, while physically, his exterior ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... few weeks in France, we returned to London, traveling through England, Ireland, and Scotland for several months. We visited the scenes that Shakespeare, Burns, and Dickens had made classic. We spent a few days at Huntingdon, the home of Oliver Cromwell, and visited the estate where he passed his early married life. While there, one of his great admirers read aloud to us a splendid article in one of the reviews, written by Carlyle, giving "The Protector," as his friend ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... carry supplies and act as assistant. And finally, as the children grew older, and the family tradition of bookishness took hold of them, there were shelves and shelves to be devoured, a strange mixture—Thackeray, Maeterlinck, Fielding, Hakluyt, Ibsen, Dickens, Ruskin, Shaw, Austen, Moliere, Defoe, Cervantes, Shakespeare,—the children dipped, or tasted or swallowed whole, according to their temperaments and the books ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Chief, "what the dickens have you got on your mind now? I ought to skin Carnes alive for talking out of turn, but if you really have an idea, I'll forgive him. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... a nervous man; however, the sight that met his eyes when he turned round did take away his presence of mind a little; and he was obliged to take four distinct puffs before he had sufficiently regained his equilibrium to inquire, "Who the—Pickwick—are you?" (The baron said "Dickens," but, as that is a naughty word, we will substitute "Pickwick," which is equally expressive, and not so wrong.) Let me see; where was I? Oh, yes! "Who the Pickwick ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... 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')
... In the bye-streets years ago, With a broomstick for a bat, a coat for wicket? Now the Bobbies hunt them so! The old ladies grumble at their skipping; The old gents object to their tip-cat; So they squat midst slums that shine like dirty dripping, Not knowing what the dickens to be at. And the young Town Children, O my brothers, Do you ask them why they stand Making mud-pies, to the horror of their mothers, In ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... enough, with what he had already, to attain the independence which was his aim and hope. His best friends in London were Charles Reade, Tom Hood, Tom Robertson, the dramatist, Charles Mathews, the comedian, Tom Taylor and Arthur Sketchley. He did not meet Mr. Dickens, though Mr. Andrew Haliday, Dickens' familiar, was also his intimate. He was much persecuted by lion hunters, and therefore had to keep his lodgings something ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... read this aloud to Oscar. You might, you know, and it wouldn't do. He would hate to believe that he'd be happier buying things at a delicatessen, and he wouldn't believe it. But it's true, just as it is true that you would be happy shining boots and making love to the maids like a character in Dickens. ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... and incident are attractively arranged, the expression of life for the most part second-hand and artificial. There are traces of Dickens' burlesque without his sympathy, and the high colouring of Lytton with less than Lytton's wit. Disraeli's satire, too, is echoed in the political scenes. The young Australian squatter, whose experiences in England were to have formed the main purpose of the book, is allowed no opportunity to show ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... foot for satire to halt on, both in Greek and English—which I read about twenty years ago, and with the point of which I was much tickled. Poetasters were laughed at; but Mr. Slum, whom I employed—Mr. Charles Dickens obliged me with his address—converted the idea into that of a hit at mathematicasters, as easily as he turned the Warren acrostic into Jarley. As he observed, when I settled his little account, it is cheaper than any prose, though the broom was not ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... had something to read," he thought,—"some nice dime novel like 'The Demon of the Danube.' That was splendid. I like it a good deal better than Dickens. It's ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... I was saying 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
... made to understand that her own affairs were not so important, after all; and that it was far more essential to hear the charming gossip about the new and most popular Princess of Wales, or the quarrel between Dickens and Thackeray. Yet, after dinner, in the little sitting-room, where the Duchess, in a white gown with great pink bows, fitter for a girl fresh from Confirmation, and her cheeks with their fixed colour, which changed only at the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... City and studied painting with Alexander Robertson. He spent the winters of 1831 and 1832 in Rome, and then for nearly a decade he lived in Boston, Massachusetts, where he had considerable vogue, and where in 1842 he painted a portrait of Charles Dickens. One of his best portraits is that of Mrs Fletcher Webster in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He died ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... disposition and inborn delicacy of feeling. But they may also, to a great extent, be learned and acquired. "Watch," it has wisely been said, "those of excellent reputation in manners. Catch the temper of the great masters of literature—the nobility of Scott, the sincerity of Thackeray, the heartiness of Dickens, the tenderness of Macdonald, the delicacy of Tennyson, the grace of Longfellow, the repose of Shakespeare." It is well worth while for every young man beginning life to form a true idea of what good manners are, and to make it his constant ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... read Mr. Dickens's 'America;' and what is your thought of it like? If I were an American, it would make me rabid, and certain of the free citizens are furious, I understand, while others 'speak peace and ensue it,' admire as much of the book as deserves any sort of admiration, and attribute ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... small boy, he and his mother used to take long walks in the woods, sometimes spending the entire day, fishing along the brooks, hunting wild flowers, now and then pausing while the mother read pages of Dickens or of Scott. These experiences Page never forgot. Nearly all his letters to his mother—to whom, even in his busiest days in New York, he wrote constantly—have been accidentally destroyed, but a few scraps indicate the close spiritual bond that existed ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... 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 that he had no love for Scott. And ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... police would think that I shot you. Give me that pistol! Give it to me, I say. You can come in here and rob to your heart's content, but I'm damned if I'll allow you to commit suicide here. That's a little too thick, Smilk. Why the dickens should you worry about that infernal jade? Aren't you going to the penitentiary for fifteen or twenty years? ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... by no means Leigh Hunt's strong point. In this respect, but not otherwise, he may have suggested Skimpole to Charles Dickens. On one of my visits I found him trying to puzzle out the abstruse question of how he should deduct some such sum as thirteen shillings and ninepence from a sovereign. On another occasion I had to pay him a sum of money, L100 or L200, and I wrote him a check for the amount. 'Well,' ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... sometimes when me and my missus get our tails up; and we're fearful pals. Daresay I just took 'em on an off day. But that was my impression though—that she wasn't just the sort of woman for old Sabre. But after all, what the dickens sort of woman would be? Fiddling chap for a husband, old Puzzlehead. Can imagine him riling any wife with wrinkling up his nut over some plain as a pikestaff thing and saying, 'Well, I don't quite see that.' Ha! Rum chap. Nice ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... Palace last Thursday—Grand! Jupiter Pluvius suspended buckets, and celestial water-works rested awhile to make way for Terrestrial Fire-works. "Todgers's can do it when it likes," as all Martin-Chuzzlewiters know, and BROCK can do it too when he likes. A propos of DICKENS' quotation above, it is on record that Mr. Pickwick was once addressed as "Old Fireworks." Where? When? and How? Mr. Pickwick, we are led to infer by the commentary thereon, somewhat objected to the term, unless ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... his boyhood had subsided into a love of little mischievous tricks; and the playful tone of humor, that rippled through his conversation, frequently reminded me of the Cheeryble Brothers, so admirably described by Dickens. If some one rang at the door, and inquired for Mr. Hopper, he always answered, "There is no such person lives here." If the stranger urged that he had been directed by a man who said he knew Mr. Hopper, he would persevere in saying, ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... 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 from early spring ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... is fraud and slaughter, His writings are watered Dickens and water; But the voice of the Nilghai raised on high Makes even the Mahdieh glad ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... occasions in England, cricket matches have been organized between armless and legless men. In Charles Dickens' paper, "All the Year Round," October 5, 1861, there is a reference to a cricket match between a one-armed eleven and a one-legged eleven. There is a recent report from De Kalb, Illinois, of a boy of thirteen ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Charles Dickens, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once made of the mechanism of Barnaby Rudge, says—"By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his Caleb Williams backwards? He first involved his hero in a web of ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... homeward from the tavern, the portly knight leading the revellers like a three-decker a line of frigates, they are encountered by Dogberry, who summons them to stand and answer to the watch as they are honest men. If Mr. Dickens's characters were gathered together, they would constitute a town populous enough to send a representative to Parliament. Let us enter. The style of architecture is unparalleled. There is an individuality about the buildings. ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... 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 there in the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... 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 ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... has miserably failed, unless inoculated with the genuine spirit of the negro; and even those who have succeeded best have done only moderately well, because they have not had the negro nature. It is reserved to some black Shakspeare or Dickens to lay open the wonderful humor, pathos, poetry, and power which slumber in the negro's soul, and which now and then flash out like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... now formed, as his mind was, and these papers bear the stamp of his peculiar way of thinking and writing. Assuredly, his is a peculiar style in the strict sense; and as marked as that of Carlyle or Dickens. You see the self-made man in it,—a something sui generis,—not formed on the "classical models," but which has grown up with a kind of twist in it, like a tree that has had to force its way up surrounded by awkward environments. Fundamentally, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... plates from which it was printed. At present it is easy to obtain all of the modern classics in volumes small enough to go into the coat-pocket. In Japan, before starting for China, we divided up among the correspondents Thomas Nelson & Sons' and Doubleday, Page & Co.'s pocket editions of Dickens, Thackeray, and Lever, and as most of our time in Manchuria was spent locked up in compounds, ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... in the forest—seven short stories.* I feel a desire, a longing, to transplant in England the first produce of my poetic garden, as a Christmas greeting: and I send it to you, my dear, noble, Charles Dickens, who by your works had been previously dear to me, and since our meeting have taken root ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... the very opposite of oriental in her appearance and characteristics. She was a tall, angular, grave-visaged person, possessing such decided, common-place good sense that she came under the head of that feminine class which Dickens has taught the world to designate as "strong-minded." There was no "stuff and nonsense" about her; she had a due appreciation of her own estimable attributes, as well as a firm conviction of the equality ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... pronounce it in all words coming to us from the Celtic "stock," and to pass it unsounded in those which are of Latin origin. If this rule be admitted, the pronunciation sanctioned by the pulpit and Mr. Dickens is condemned. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... read not only such works as the Vicar of Wakefield, Washington Irving's Sketch Book, and Lamb's Shakespeare Stories, which had been part of Lucy's course during her first year at college, but that she had also read some of the works of Cooper, George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... enough to carry it, and he staked Whitey to a horse to make the rest of the trip with, Whitey to return the horse on his way back. When they reached Zumbro Creek it hadn't gone down a bit, except to go down stream, and it was doing that like the dickens. It certainly was a very bad-tempered-looking creek, but Cal Smith ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... we 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 effort ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... little specialty of mine, a talent—But what the dickens are you all gaping at? It is my own corsets; I have used them myself—don't you understand? I used them when I began to grow stout; I laced and thought it would help. But it ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... as one of her own clear muslins; the cook and housemaid looking as attentive as they could; and the under-servants staring with vacant eyes—eyes that looked as if they were ready to drop out of their heads; Mr. Buckminster, as the charming Dickens has it, so "respectable;" Thomas, all spirit and enthusiasm; and Charles doing all in his ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Josiah Quincy, Jr., at the banquet given by the "Young Men of Boston" at Boston, Mass., February 1, 1842, to Charles Dickens, upon his first visit to America. Mr. Quincy was the President of the evening. About two hundred gentlemen sat at the tables, the brilliant company including George Bancroft, Richard H. Dana, Sr., Richard H. Dana, Jr., Washington Allston, the painter, Oliver ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... "Doesn't it beat the dickens what a little world this is?" he exclaimed, with a true bromidian disregard for the outworn and the axiomatic. "Of course, I knew you were in or around Boston somewhere, but to run slap up against you ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... the same time Mr. Dickens and Mr. Thackeray were giving readings from their works in England and America. Both readers were equally popular; but while they made a considerable addition to their fortunes,{1} Jasmin realised nothing ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... words to express what it represented to me of pure unmixed delight in my youth and boyhood, long before I ever dreamed of being an artist myself! It stands out of the path with such names as Dickens, Dumas, Byron—not indeed that I am claiming for him an equal rank with those immortals, who wielded a weapon so much more potent than a mere caricaturist's pencil! But if an artist's fame is to be measured by the mere quantity ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... genius, eludes analysis; but some of its characteristics are not hard to define. His wonderful keenness of observation and tenacity of remembrance of the pettinesses of daily existence, which in its amazing minuteness reminds us of Dickens and Mark Twain, and his sensitiveness to the humorous aspects of their little misfits and hypocrisies and lack of proportion, might if untempered have made him a literary cynic like some others, remembered ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... extraordinarily raised by it. Tom and Jerry were as popular twenty years since as Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller now are; and often have we wished, while reading the biographies of the latter celebrated personages, that they had been described as well by Mr. Cruikshank's pencil as by Mr. Dickens's pen. ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... allies, it is agreed that hypocrisy is our national vice, our ruling passion. There must be some meaning in so widely held an opinion; and, on our side, there are damaging admissions by many witnesses. The portrait gallery of Charles Dickens is crowded with hypocrites. Some of them are greasy and servile, like Mr. Pumblechook or Uriah Heep; others rise to poetic heights of daring, like Mr. Chadband or Mr. Squeers. But Shakespeare's hypocrites enjoy themselves ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... would presently disappear. One finds this confident belief in Progress towards political equality—Progress that required no human effort, but was inherent in the scheme of things—very strong in Dickens, for example, who spoke for the average Englishman as no later writer can be said to have done. This belief fell in very happily with that disposition to funk a crisis, that vulgar dread of vulgar action ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Hand leader goes naturally towards the saloon, the gambling house and the dens where thieves congregate. Dickens made Fagin surround himself ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... trout, a species of char, has been alluded to, and is the only one which affords much sport to the fisherman; it runs to a large size, as has been stated, but does not often take the fly. Its curious name is said to be derived indirectly from Dickens and the time of his tours in the United States, which produced a Dolly Varden craze in hats and some kinds of calico patterns, of which one with pink spots was supposed to be the correct Dolly Varden pattern. On seeing this fish for the first time, ...
— Fishing in British Columbia - With a Chapter on Tuna Fishing at Santa Catalina • Thomas Wilson Lambert
... in the dickens are you doing out here in the mines, by all that's holey?—and what's all this story in the Goldite News about one Bronson Van Buren doing the benevolent brigand stunt with you and your maid, and ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... forgotten both the problem and the girl. Three evenings later he shared his Hollandaise sauce with somebody in yellow (as luck would have it) and she changed the subject by wondering if he read Dickens. He is now going manfully through "Bleak House"—a chapter a night—and when he came to visit me to-day he asked me if I had ever ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... 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 at his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... their vividness and apparent actuality. When this is the case, illusions of memory may arise at once just as in the case of dreams. This will happen more easily when the imagination has for some time been occupied with the same group of ideal scenes, persons, or events. To Dickens, as is well known, his fictitious characters were for the time realities, and after he had finished his story their forms and their doings lingered with him, assuming the aspect of personal recollections. So, too, the energetic activity of imagination which accompanies a deep and absorbing sympathy ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... man and woman had meant animal passion. Fielding and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. A woman's gentle, legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and passion was another. Thackeray and Dickens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To all three of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, temporary, episodic, and therefore comparatively unimportant. Thackeray intimated that he could have done more with it but for his fear of Mrs. Grundy. Anyhow, passion was not a ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... was written by Charles Dickens in 1867. It is the third of four stories entitled "Holiday Romance" and was published originally in a children's magazine in America. It purports to be written by a child aged nine. It was republished in England in "All the Year Round" in 1868. For this and four ...
— Captain Boldheart & the Latin-Grammar Master - A Holiday Romance from the Pen of Lieut-Col. Robin Redforth, aged 9 • Charles Dickens
... is a capital sensational story to be read and at once forgotten. It was followed by "The Astonishing History of Troy Town," which was humorous, and proved that the author owed a debt to Dickens. But it was not sufficiently humorous to be remarkable for its humor, and it will go hand in hand with "Dead Man's Rock" to oblivion. Until "The Splendid Spur" appeared Mr. Quiller-Couch had done little to suggest ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... always fall over them if you don't look where you are going; and he turned all the canvas into panes of glass, and put it up on his iron cross-poles; and made all the little booths into one great booth; and people said it was very fine, and a new style of architecture; and Mr. Dickens said nothing was ever like it in Fairyland, which was very true. And then the little Pthah set to work to put fine fairings in it; and he painted the Nineveh bulls afresh, with the blackest eyes he could paint (because he had none himself), ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... window. It is ever thus, "that men go to fierce extremes rather than rest upon the quiet flow of truths that soften hatred and temper strife." There was that unknown quantity, present in all legislative bodies, composed of good "little men" without courage of conviction, others of the Dickens' "devilish sly" type, who put out their plant-like tendrils for support; others "who bent the pliant servile knee that thrift may follow fawning"—all these the make-weight of a necessary constituent in representative ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... read a thousand of their productions without suspecting, if you did not already know the fact, that it had any connexion with our physical nature. The men and women, youths and maidens, of Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot, to say nothing of minor writers, are true enough to nature in other respects, but in all sexual relations they are mere simulacri. George Meredith is our only novelist who triumphs in this region. As Mr. Lowell has noticed, there is a fine natural ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... beauty moved and impressed him; but some quality inherent in her upon which he felt disposed to confer the title of genius. That was going far.—Mentally he pulled himself up short.—For wasn't it going altogether too far—absurdly so? What the dickens did this excessive admiration portend? Could he have received the coup de foudre?—He had to-day a fancy for French tags, in reaction from the family's over-powering Englishness.—That wouldn't suit his book ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... he said politely, so as not to hurt her feelings and lose his head, "but I'll tell you what"—he added, pointing to a picture of Dickens—"we can call this man Confoundit just ...
— Half-Past Seven Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson
... in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across him by chance. They had been going over the prisons of London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of Wainewright. He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was 'horrified ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... by papa's letter about the carpenter who fell off the staging: I don't think I was ever so much excited in my life. The man was back at his work, and I asked him how he was; but he was a Highlander, and—need I add it?—dickens a word could I understand of his answer. What is still worse, I find the people here-about—that is to say, the Highlanders, not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Christianity, wrote, "It must be clear to everybody, I should think, that those who are sinners by nature and training, none could change, not even by punishment—to say nothing of doing it by pity." Dickens' Pecksniff "always said of what was very bad that it was very natural." But it has been the glory of the Gospel that it could speak in the past tense of some at least of the sins of its adherents: "such were some of you." Individual regeneration will ever remain a large part of God's work through ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... by no means fell short of Jack's forecast; on the contrary, it exceeded it. His memory failed him as to what transpired after three in the morning; he woke at noon in a strange bed, with a sense of overmastering languor, and a head that felt too big for his body. Vance Dickens, with a palette on his thumb, was standing over him. He laughed till the roof ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... a subject, being reminded, as I was, that the subject of the law was unpopular, I turned—as I have often done in the hour of trouble—I turned to my Dickens, and there I found that at any rate in Dickens we have a great literary man who has been impartial in his treatment of lawyers. He has seen both the good and the bad in them, and it occurred to me that my lecture might ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... not do? He mimicked birds and animals; he imitated a wheezy phonograph playing "When We Were a Couple of Kids"; he recited "The Raven" and "Paul Revere's Ride"; he gave a cutting from Dickens and one from Sheridan Knowles; he showed how Joe Jefferson played Rip Van Winkle, how Sol Smith ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... we should have grown like them, but our father was a bookish man, and with him we travelled; we went with Dickens and Thackeray and those fellows, and as we came to different places in the books, he told us all about them. He'd seen them all, so we got to know his country pretty well. Once he took us to Harrisburg, and by multiplying everything ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... that a French picture dealer is to 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 or Civic Museum. There must be neither ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Ash. Odds 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 you—Nelly, who was formerly our servant, has fortunately ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton
... began to bud about his heart; a genial warmth was diffused over him; his soul got green within him; every day was serene, and if a cloud happened to become visible, there was a roguish rainbow astride of it, on which sat a beautiful Iris that laughed down at him and seemed to say, "Why the dickens, Neal, don't you marry ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... upon to consider, but rather how much of Literature's valuable time shall be taken up by this dialectic country cousin. This question Literature her gracious self most amiably answers by hugging to her breast voluminous tomes, from Chaucer on to Dickens, from Dickens on to Joel Chandler Harris. And this affectionate spirit on the part of Literature, in the main, ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... world—had flaunted Piccadilly and Pall Mall before the dazzled eyes of an astonished suburban. She could remember how she read it aloud to him, because, when he read over her shoulder, she always turned the page before he was ready. And his decision that Dickens's characters were never gentlemen, and her saying perhaps that was why he was so amusing. And then how he got the book from her and went on reading while she went away for her lawn-tennis shoes, and when she came back found he had only two more pages to read, and then ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... 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 would ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger
... totally unprepared,—and for this good reason, that such malignity of criticism as is possible in America could never have suggested it. Let us not be misunderstood. We acknowledge the "Rowdy Journal" and Mr. Jefferson Brick. Undoubtedly, newspapers exist among us of which the description of Mr. Dickens is no very extravagant caricature. But their editors, if not of notoriously infamous life, are those whose minds are unenlarged by any generous education,—men whose lack of grammar suggests a certain palliation of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... England, and I saw some of your redeemed, regenerated, 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 ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... smoking in his shirt-sleeves, while pretty Dolly Varden herself was tripping down to town. "There," said my host, "isn't that clever? It stood for many years at the 'Hen and Chickens' in Birmingham, and Dickens used to admire it very much when he used to visit that town on his reading tours." Two little Japanese figures, reposing upon the top of the case which contained this model, looked down upon Mr. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... successive stages in the development of American transportation were much alike in essentials—they were all optimistic, self-congratulatory, irrepressible in their enthusiasm, and undaunted in their outlook. Dickens, perhaps, did not miss the truth widely when, in speaking of stage driving, he said that the cry of "Go Ahead!" in America and of "All Right!" in England were typical of the civilizations of the two countries. Right or wrong, "Go Ahead!" has always been the underlying ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... that horrible story of Dickens', in the 'Pickwick Papers,' about the man who was mad, and knew it, yet successfully concealed it for years? Well, I believe there are many people like that in the world, people whose lives are one long struggle against insanity, and ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... "Charles Dickens is here, sir," said the waiter, who knew Ben. "Two models of the Curiosity Shop have just gone upstairs, sir. His room ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... influence down English literature for the last century and a half would take me much too long for your patience. In Dickens, in Carlyle, even in Ruskin, the Shandean element is often present and not rarely predominant. None of those great men would have expressed himself exactly as he does but for Laurence Sterne. And coming down to our own time, I see the influence of Sterne everywhere. The pathos of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... never hidden my admirations in literature. They have been and are Dickens, Balzac, Poe, Dostoievski and, now, Stendhal...." writes Baroja in the preface to the Nelson edition of La Dama Errante ("The Wandering Lady"). He follows particularly in the footprints of Balzac in that he is primarily a historian of morals, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... 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 ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... is fault to be found in Chesterton's masterly study of Charles Dickens it lies in the fact that in parts of the book the meaning is not always clear, or, rather, it is not always so at a first reading. Whether this may be justly termed a fault depends largely upon what the reader ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... you work as you do, and always refuse to come to a supper, or a dance, or anything? You can't be really a quiet fellow or you wouldn't write things the English won't have. You say it's not a question of Lucia—then what the dickens is it that makes you live the ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... brown rat. "I always appreciate a friendly word. I'm as hungry as the dickens. Have you something or other you can treat me to? I don't care ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... and the money was in my pocket, and the letter was empty! But now, look here!—I never meant to steal the note. I am not a Newgate thief, yet. I was in an uncommon fix just then, over a certain affair; and if I could not stop the fellow's mouth, there'd have been the dickens to pay. So I took the money for that stop-gap, never intending to do otherwise than replace it in Galloway's desk as soon as I could get it. I knew I should be having some from Lord Carrick. It was all Lady Augusta's ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... if still in friendly recognition; but the sombre reflections of Dashall and his friend were broke in upon by a countryman with, "Beant that Measter Fox, zur?" "His effigy, my 17friend." "Aye, aye, but what the dickens ha've they wrapt a blanket ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... prophesied concerning his future, it is not likely that they spoke of literary fame. They thought him just easy-going and light-minded. True, they noticed that he often carried a book under his arm—a history, a volume of Dickens, or the ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... opinions, convictions, what sort of a person thou hast become, what life has taught thee." (Mikhalevitch still retained the phraseology of the '30s.) "So far as I myself am concerned, I have changed in many respects, brother: the billows of life have fallen upon my breast,—who the dickens was it that said that?—although, in important, essential points, I have not changed; I believe, as of yore, in the good, in the truth; but I not only believe,—I am now a believer, yes—I am a believer, a religious believer. Hearken, thou knowest that I write verses; there is no poetry ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... dickens he means to take us," confided Billy to Lathrop as they obediently trailed along behind, "but so long as we get something to eat I'm so hungry that I don't care if we get eaten the ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... speak from rare experience, are truly excellent. Bears, in our early London days, were kept by many hairdressers and perfumers. The anecdote or passage from Dickens's "Humphrey's ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... 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 ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... 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 struck the child mind. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... right about French women. They are like French dishes, uncommonly well cooked and sent up, but what the dickens they are made of is a mystery. Not but what all womenkind are mysteries, but there are mysteries of godliness ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... 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 us, but is often ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... 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 ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... great deal to think about lately, Otoyo continued, and she was reading a book of Charles Dickens, the English novelist. ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... KATE DICKENS. Younger daughter of Charles Dickens and wife of Charles Edward Perugini. This artist has exhibited at the Royal Academy and at other exhibitions since 1877. Her pictures are of genre subjects, such as the "Dolls' Dressmaker," "Little-Red-Cap," "Old Curiosity Shop," etc. At ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... to mingle instruction with entertainment; and the humorous touches, especially in the sketch of John Holl, the Westminster dustman, Dickens himself ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... our turn in the barber's chair; we shall argue and muddle and mope. And yet, for a few hours, what a happy vision that was! And we turn, on Christmas Eve, to pages which those who speak our tongue immortally associate with the season—the pages of Charles Dickens. Love of humanity endures as long as the thing it loves, and those pages are packed as full of it as a pound cake is full of fruit. A pound cake will keep moist three years; a sponge cake ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Broadway—that noted avenue of New York's crowded and mixed humanity, and of so many notables. Here I saw, during those times, Andrew Jackson, Webster, Clay, Seward, Martin Van Buren, filibuster Walker, Kossuth, Fitz Greene Halleck, Bryant, the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens, the first Japanese ambassadors, and lots of other celebrities of the time. Always something novel or inspiriting; yet mostly to me the hurrying and vast amplitude of those never-ending human currents. I remember seeing James ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... possessive case, singular and plural, of: Actor, king, fairy, calf, child, goose, lady, monkey, mouse, ox, woman, deer, eagle, princess, elephant, man, witness, prince, fox, farmer, countess, mouth, horse, day, year, lion, wolf, thief, Englishman. 2. Write the possessive case of: James, Dickens, his sister Mary, Miss Austen, the Prince of Wales, Frederick the Great, Harper and Brothers, father-in-law, Charles, Jones, William the Conqueror, Henry the Eighth, ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler |
