Charles Dickens

'suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.'

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit, has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to total disagreement as to all the premises.

He had a fear of the dead, and of all inanimate things, rising up around him to claim him; it is the fear of the pre-eminently solitary child and solitary man.

Of all the Victorian novelists, he was probably the most antagonistic to the Victorian age itself.

You will not have forgotten that it was a maxim with Foxey — our revered father, gentlemen — "Always suspect everybody." That's the maxim to go through life with!

You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boys whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since - on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. Oh, God bless you, God forgive you!

The bearings of this observation lays in the application on it.

Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of man in the weak modern way; he was the brotherhood of man, and knew it was a brotherhood in sin as well as in aspiration.

“She means well,” said Mr Jarndyce, hastily. “The wind’s in the east.” “It was in the north, sir, as we came down,” observed Richard. “My dear Rick,” said Mr Jarndyce, poking the fire, “I’ll take an oath it’s either in the east, or going to be. I am always conscious of an uncomfortable sensation now and then when the wind is blowing in the east.”

I want to be something so much worthier than the doll in the doll's house.

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving HOW NOT TO DO IT.

He’s tough, ma’am,—tough is J. B.; tough and devilish sly.

Minerva House ... was "a finishing establishment for young ladies," where some twenty girls of the ages from thirteen to nineteen inclusive, acquired a smattering of everything and a knowledge of nothing.

There is a heartlessness behind his sentimentally overflowing style.

Once a gentleman, and always a gentleman.

"I want to know what it says," he answered, looking steadily in her face. "The sea Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?"

Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it.
When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens’s works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as ‘almost’ a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as ‘almost’ a Catholic, and both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or ‘the poor’, as Chesterton would have put it).

'Don't you be afraid of hurting the boy,' he says.

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.

It does not matter that Dicken's world is not lifelike; it is alive.