dickens

She was thinkingöfor, since she had been formed by literature, she could think in no other wayöthat all this had been described in Dickens,Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and a dozen others. All that noble and terrific indignation had done nothing, achieved nothing, the shout of anger from the nineteenth century might as well have been silentöfor here came the file of prisoners, handcuffed two by two, and on their faces was that same immemorial look of patient, sardonic understanding.

—Lessing, Doris May ne¤  e Tayler

We were put to Dickens as children but it never took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

—Bennett, Alan

Dickens was not the first or the last novelist to find virtue more difficult to portray than the wish for it.

—Pritchett, Sir V(ictor) S(awdon)

An episode out of George Orwell rewritten by Charles Dickens.

—Cooke, (Alfred) Alistair

   Think of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him through triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were wisely considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any work much more considerable than a halfpenny post-card? Who would project a serial novel, afterThackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course? Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?

—Stevenson, Robert Louis