Abstract
For all his intellectual reservations about the work of Dickens, George Henry Lewes wrote of the irresistible nature of its immediate appeal to the feelings: ‘If an author makes me laugh, he is humorous; if he makes me cry, he is pathetic. In vain will any one tell me that such a picture is not laughable, is not pathetic; or that I am wrong in being moved.’1 If at the time of reading, you are personally moved, argues Lewes, you cannot simply get away from the sheer fact of that experience.
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Notes
Versatile Victorian: Selected Writings of George Henry Lewes, ed. Rosemary Ashton (London: Bristol Classical Press and Duckworth, 1992), p. 68.
Thomas Carlyle, ‘Characteristics’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899), III, 1–43 (p. 9).
Elizabeth Gaskell, luyen Cranford, ed. P. Keating (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), Chapter 6, p. 100.
Elizabeth Gaskell, luyen North and South, ed. M. Dodsworth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 468.
luyen The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 37–8.
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans (London: Chapman, 1853), p. 21.
George Eliot, luyen Adam Bede, ed. Stephen Gill (London: Penguin, 1985), Chapter 4, p. 97.
Charles Dickens, luyen Bleak House, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), Chapter 15, p. 230. Further references will be given in the text by page number in this edition.
Benedict de Spinoza, luyen Ethics, trans. George Eliot, ed. T. Deegan (Salzburg: University of Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1981), p. 151, end of Part 3, ‘General Definition of the Emotions’.
Charles Dickens, luyen David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), Chapter 42, p. 509. Further references will be given in the text by page number in this edition.
Charles Dickens, luyen The Old Curiosity Shop, ed. Paul Schlicke (London: Everyman, 1995), Chapter 16, pp. 134–5.
Charles Dickens, luyen A Christmas Carol, ed. Michael Slater (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), Stave 1, p. 47. Further references will be given in the text by page number in this edition.
Doris Lessing, Under My Skin (London: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 218.
William Wordsworth, luyen Prose Works, eds W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), I, 142.
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Davis, P. (2000). Victorian Realist Prose and Sentimentality. In: Jenkins, A., John, J. (eds) Rereading Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371149_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371149_2
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