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POPULAR DICKENS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

Lisa Rodensky
Lisa Rodensky*
Affiliation:
Wellesley College
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Extract

Why was Charles Dickens so popular when he broke onto the scene in the late 1830s? That's still a real question to ask, but so is another, related question: what did the terms “popular” and “popularity” mean when applied to this novelist at this signal moment in the development of the novel? Writing in the National Magazine and Monthly Critic: A Journal of Philosophy, Science, Literature, Music, and the Drama – a short-lived monthly designed to publish serious work on various subjects – G. H. Lewes begins his 1837 review of Dickens's Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, and Oliver Twist with a paragraph that worries over the nature of popularity:

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , September 2009 , pp. 583 - 607
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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