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In: Essays, Letters & Speeches·British Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #72466.
Arthur Quiller‑Couch’s Charles Dickens and Other Victorians is a scholarly collection of lectures originally delivered at Cambridge in the early twentieth century. The volume opens with a prefatory note explaining that most of the papers were spoken from a desk, except for a piece on Trollope that first appeared in The Nation and the Athenaeum. Quiller‑Couch frames his study of Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell and Trollope as a series of judgments on their status as novelists, interspersed with thematic essays that compare how a single idea works on different minds. The opening chapter on Dickens begins with a vivid description of Westminster Hall, using the historic setting to illustrate the young author’s first encounter with the space and to argue for Dickens’s unique place as a national institution. The book proceeds through a detailed table of contents that maps the author’s systematic, lecture‑style approach to each Victorian figure.
The voice is that of a learned professor speaking directly to an educated audience, marked by long, flowing sentences, frequent classical allusions, and a confident, sometimes polemical tone. Its style reflects the erudite lecture‑culture of the 1920s, blending literary criticism with historical anecdote. Readers who enjoy dense, historically grounded essays, particularly those interested in Victorian literary history, the evolution of critical opinion, and the cultural stature of figures like Dickens and Thackeray, will find Quiller‑Couch’s measured, richly textured analysis rewarding.
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All save one of the papers here collected were written as lectures and read from a desk at Cambridge; the exception being that upon Trollope, contributed to The Nation and the Athenaeum and pleasantly provoked by a recent edition of the “Barsetshire” novels. To these it almost wholly confines itself. But a full estimate of Trollope as one of our greatest English novelists--and perhaps the raciest of them all--is long overdue, awaiting a complete edition of him. His bulk is a part of his quality: it can no more be separated from the man than can Falstaff’s belly from Falstaff. He will certainly come to his own some day, but this implies his coming with all his merits and all his defects: and this again cannot happen until some publisher shows enterprise. The expensive and artificial vogue of the three-volume-novel did wonders for Trollope in one generation, to kill him for another: since no critic can talk usefully about books to many of which his hearers have no access. But we shall see Trollope reanimated.
The papers on Dickens and Thackeray attempt judgment on them as full novelists. Those on Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell merely take a theme, and try to show how one theme, taking possession, will work upon two very different minds. Much more could have been said generally upon both authors, and generically upon the “idea” of a novel.
As usual, with a few corrections, I leave these lectures as they were written and given, at intervals and for their purpose. They abound therefore with repetitions and reminders which the reader must try to forgive.
ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.
January 5, 1925.
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