A Literary Middle English Reader

It is his seemingly unself-critical indulgence of popular attitudes (in addition, of course, to the narrative conventions he borrows from popular art) that has led to most of the disparagement Dickens has suffered. Trollope parodied him, in The Warden, as "Mr. Popular Sentiment," and F. R. Leavis initially excluded him from the "Great Tradition" because he was too much a "popular entertainer," and "not completely serious." Surprise at Dickens's own personal «vulgarity» also was not uncommon. Richard Henry Dana wrote: "You admire him, & there is a fascination about him which keeps your eyes on him, yet you cannot get over the impression that he is a low bred man… Take the genius out of his face & there are a thousand young London shop-keepers… who look exactly like him." Edward Fitzgerald thought him a "Cockney Snob." Even his good friend John Forster never ceased to feel that Dickens's public readings were beneath the dignity of a literary man. Yet while Dickens's style-both personal and narrational-seemed to represent the humble man to himself flatteringly, it also domesticated the underdog sensibility in ways that Dickens's middle-class readers found congenial ...»