All citations from Dickens’ novels are from the Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: 1948–64) except those from the novels Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit, and David Copperfield, which appear in The Clarendon Dickens (Oxford: 1966, 1974, 1979, 1981), and those from the novels Hard Times and Bleak House, which appear in the Norton Critical Edition series (New York: 1966, 1977). Quotations from Thackeray are from The Oxford Thackeray With Illustrations, edited by George Saintsbury (London: 1908), with the exception of those from Vanity Fair, which are from the Riverside edition (Boston: 1963), edited by Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson. Since the volumes in The Oxford Thackeray are not numbered, I have indicated for essays and other short pieces the title of the volume in which each appears. The Carlyle quotations are from The Centenary Edition of Carlyle’s Works (London: 1896–99).
Notes to Chapter One
1. Tom Jones, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Middletown, Conn.: 1975), 7:1. All references to Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews are to The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding, edited by Battestin and Bowers.
2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; Indianapolis: 1958), Part II, chap. 17, p. 139.
3. Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Middletown, Conn.: 1967), p. 9.
4. The subject is indeed more complicated than the OED entry reflects, mainly because of the complex cultural history that adheres to words and phrases such as sentiment, sentimental, sentimentality, the sentimental novel, sensibility, and the man of sensibility or feeling. In both its sparsity and unhelpfulness, the literature on the subject reflects its elusiveness, especially the difficulty of consistent definitions. Erick Erametsa’s A Study of the Word “Sentimental” (Helsinki: 1951) does not resolve the difficulties. Barbara Hardy, in Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction (Athens, Ohio: 1985), deals with Dickens’ sentimentality in non-Victorian terms. Among those general works on the subject that I have found helpful are Northrop Frye, “Toward Defining an Age of Sensibility,” in Eighteenth Century English Literature, Modern Essays in Criticism (Oxford: 1959), pp. 311-18; Louis I. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit: 1962); R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York: 1974); Robert Bledsoe, “Pendennis and the Power of Sentimentality: A Study of Motherly Love,” PMLA 91 (1976), 846–55; Richard O. Allen, “If You Have Tears: Sentimentalism as Soft Romanticism,” Genre 8 (1977), 119–45; G. A. Starr, “‘Only A Boy’: Notes on Sentimental Novels,” Genre 8 (1977), 501–27; William J. Palmer, “Dickens and the Eighteenth Century,” Dickens Studies Annual, ed. R. B. Partlow, 6 (1977), 15–39; and John Irving, “In Defense of Sentimentality,” New York Times Book Review, 25 November 1980, p. 3.
5. David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London: 1825), 2:331, 198. This edition, quite popular in the Victorian period, is the one that Dickens owned.
6. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Edinburgh: 1759), ed. E. G. West (Indianapolis: 1969), 3:204–5, 228–29, 234–35. In David Copperfield, Micawber claims that his exertions to expose Heep’s crimes were “stimulated by the silent monitor within, and by a no less touching and appealing monitor without” (chap. 52).
7. William Makepeace Thackeray, The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, chap. 4, p. 620.
8. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man (1733–34); in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (New Haven: 1950), vol. 2, Epistle I, p. 292; Epistle II, pp. 175, 217–18, 231–32.
9. Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle II, p. 183.
10. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), in Oxford English Novels, ed. Louis Landa (Oxford: 1968), p. 165.
11. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722), in Oxford English Novels, ed. G. A. Starr (Oxford: 1971), p. 278. The Political History of the Devil (1726), in The Novels and Miscellaneous Works of Defoe (London: 1840), 10:368 and passim.
12. Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc. (1711), ed. John M. Robertson (London: 1963), 1:309, 317.
13. Francis Hutcheson, An Essay Concerning the Principles and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1725, 1728, 1742), reprint of 1742 ed., ed. Paul McReynolds (Gainesville: 1969), pp. 236, 204–5.
14. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), ed. Charles W. Hendel (Indianapolis: 1957), p. 105.
15. Joseph Andrews, p. 188.
16. Joseph Andrews, p. 324.
17. Lady Bradshaigh to Samuel Richardson, 9 January 1750. Quoted in William Lynn Phelps, “Richardson’s Influence,” in Samuel Richardson, The History of Clarissa Harlow (London: 1901), l:x.
18. Dickens owned a five-volume edition of Goldsmith’s Works (1792). The edition of record is Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: 1966). Richard H. Hopkins, in The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith (Baltimore: 1969), argues that the Vicar is a satire whose prime target is Primrose.
19. John Forster, The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (London: 1848; 2d ed. 1854), vol. 2, bk. 13, pp. 3,15.
20. Boswell, quoted from Life of Johnson, bk. 3, pp. 95–96, in Forster, Life of Goldsmith, vol. 2, bk. 6, p. 308.
21. Edwin Eigner, in The Metaphysical Novel in England and America: Dickens, Bulwer, Hawthorne, Melville (Berkeley: 1978), presents the most effective analysis I have read of the anti-realistic novel in the nineteenth century.
1. Letter from Dickens to Angela Coutts, 29 March 1849, in The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Graham Storey and K.J. Fielding (Oxford: 1981), 5:517.
2. Joseph Andrews, p. 10.
3. Pilgrim (1965), ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey, 1:639.
4. Pilgrim (1974), ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, 3:57, n. 7.
5. Letter from Dickens to John Forster, 2 March 1842, in Pilgrim, 3:211.
6. Richard Henry Horne, The New Spirit of the Age (London: 1844, 1907), pp. 46–47.
7. Henry Hallam, quoted in R. C. Churchill, A Bibliography of Dickensian Criticism, 1836–1976 (New York: 1975), pp. 183–84.
8. R. H. Hutton, quoted in Churchill, Dickensian Criticism, p. 184.
9. William Dodd, Reflections on Death (London: 1763), pp. 5–6.
10. Dodd, Reflections on Death, p. 62.
11. Boswell, quoted from Life of Johnson, bk. 3, pp. 95–99, in Forster, Life of Goldsmith, 1:308.
12. Arthur Hugh Clough, “Recent English Poetry,” The North American Review 77 (1853), 1–30. Quoted in Park Honan, Matthew Arnold, A Life (New York: 1981), p. 282.
13. See Humphry House, The Dickens World (Oxford: 1941), pp. 36–54, and William Palmer, “Dickens and the Eighteenth Century,” in Dickens Studies Annual, ed. R. B. Partlow, 6 (1977), 15–39.
14. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 208.
15. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 212.
16. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 212.
17. Hume, Essays and Treatises, pp. 327–28.
18. Letter from Dickens to Wilkie Collins, 13 July 1856, in The Nonesuch Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (London: 1938), 2:792.
19. Matthew Arnold, “To An Independent Preacher.”
Notes to Chapter Three
1. Jane Ellen Frith Panton, Leaves From A Life (London: 1908), pp. 150–51.
2. William Makepeace Thackeray, “Charity and Humour,” added to the New York edition of The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (New York: 1853). It appears in Christmas Books, Rebecca and Rowena, and Late Minor Papers, 1849–1861, pp. 626, 628.
3. Thackeray, “Charity and Humour,” p. 617.
4. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, comp and ed. Gordon N. Ray (Cambridge, Mass: 1945), 2:772–73.
5. See John Stonehouse, Catalogue of the Libraries of Charles Dickens and William Thackeray (London: 1935).
6. Thackeray’s Contributions to the Morning Chronicle, ed. Gordon N. Ray (Urbana, Ill.: 1955), p. 114.
7. Letters and Private Papers, 1:56, 166; 2:234.
8. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 204–5.
9. William Makepeace Thackeray, “Fielding’s Works,” The Times, 2 September 1840. It appears in Catherine, A Shabby Genteel Story, The Second Funeral of Napoleon and Miscellanies, 1840–1841, p. 383.
10. See Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray, The Age of Wisdom 1847–1863 (New York: 1958), pp. 148–56.
11. Thackeray, “Fielding’s Works,” p. 387. See E.D.H. Johnson, “Vanity Fair and Amelia: Thackeray in the Perspective of the Eighteenth Century,” Modern Philology 59 (1961), 100–113.
12. Thackeray, “Fielding’s Works,” p. 386.
13. Thackeray, “Charity and Humour,” p. 625.
14. Thackeray, “Charity and Humour,” p. 627.
Notes to Chapter Four
1. I have chosen these passages because, among other reasons, they are those used by Russell A. Fraser in “Sentimentality in Thackeray’s The Newcomes,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 4 (December 1949), 187–96, as examples of Thackeray’s sentimentality. Fraser assumes that his readers know what sentimentality is, and that they think it bad in various ways.
2. See Ray, Thackeray, The Age of Wisdom, p. 424.
3. Partly because of his birth, his education, and his interest in the “moral gentleman,” Thackeray is less engaged than Dickens and Carlyle with the problems of work, either practical or theoretical. Dobbin, of course, works; the army is a profession. Pendennis struggles with Grub Street. Thackeray himself faced admirably the challenge of working to support himself and his family after the loss of his inheritance. But the general attitude toward work expressed in Thackeray’s fiction is that it does not really contribute to moral definition, that neither personal nor social salvation depends upon it. Unlike Dickens and Carlyle, Thackeray is more interested in tone than in effort, and he seems at most mildly concerned with Tennyson’s Carlylean notion of “use and name and fame,” an allusion to the artist and art as having an active social dimension.
4. George Brinsely, Essays, ed. William George Clark (London: 1882), p. 256.
Notes to Chapter Five
1. New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London: 1904), 2:122.
2. See “Phallus-Worship” (1848), MS., Hilles Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University, and Fred Kaplan, “‘Phallus-Worship’ (1848): A Response to the Revolution of 1848,” Carlyle Newsletter 2 (1980), 19–23.
3. William Blake, “Mock On Mock On Voltaire Rousseau.”
4. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Duke-Edinburgh ed., ed. Charles R. Sanders and K.J. Fielding (Durham, N.C.: 1970), 7:54–55.
5. See Charles R. Sanders, “The Byron Closed in Sartor Resartus,” Studies in Romanticism 3 (1964), 77–108.
6. Ray, Thackeray, The Age of Wisdom, p. 191.
7. See Kaplan, “Phallus-Worship,” p. 22.
8. See Fred Kaplan, “Carlyle’s Marginalia and George Henry Lewes’ Fiction,” Carlyle Newsletter 5 (1984), 21–27.
9. New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London: 1903), 2:47.
10. The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: 1946), pp. 552–53.
11. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845–1846, ed. Elvan Kintner (Cambridge, Mass: 1969), 2:667.