Volume 26, Number 4 · March 22, 1979
Dickens on the Barricades
By Edgar Johnson
Dickens and Charity
by Norris Pope
Columbia University Press, 303 pp., $16.50
Dickens on America and the Americans
edited by Michael Slater
University of Texas Press, 249 pp., $12.95
The Supernatural Short Stories of Charles Dickens
edited by Michael Hayes
Riverrun Press, 159 pp., $8.95
Conventional wisdom describes the Victorian age as one of monolithic assurance, solid with horsehair furniture and heavy Sunday sermons followed by heavy Sunday dinners. Only little by little, according to this view, was its moral complacency chipped away by what Ruskin called 'the dreadful hammers' of the geologists clinking at 'every cadence of the Bible' and later in the century by the still more ominous speculations of Darwin.
Review, 2995 words
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