The greatest of superficial novelists... It were, in our opinion, an offense against humanity to place Mr Dickens among the greatest novelists.

He describes London like a special correspondent for posterity.

A splendid muse of fiction hath Charles Dickens, But now and then just as the interest thickens He stilts his pathos, and the reader sickens.

There is no contemporary English writer whose works are read so generally through the whole house, who can give pleasure to the servants as well as to the mist…

Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of…

The fecundity and the importance of a literary form are often measured by the trash it contains.

I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attack…