'Our parents had accumulated a large number of books, which we were allowed to browse in as much as we liked.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Vivian (Molly) Hughes Print: Book
'After tea...[on a Sunday, my father]...liked to read aloud to us from books that sounded quite well, but afforded some chance of frivolity.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Vivian (Molly) Hughes Print: Book
Henry Mayhew interviews a former London pickpocket, turned patterer; grew up in Shropshire, father a Wesleyan minister:
"...I have read Paine, and Valney, and Holyoake, those infidel writers, and have also read the works of Bulwer, Dickens and numbers of others..."
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book, Serial / periodical
'Even before [Chaim Lewis] discovered the English novelists, he was introduced to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Pushkin by a Russian revolutionary rag merchant who studied Dickens in the Whitechapel Public Library and read aloud from Man and Superman. Another friend - the son of a widowed mother, who left school at fourteen - exposed him to Egyptology, Greek architecture, Scott, Smollett, the British Musuem and Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: a revolutionary Russian rag merchant Print: Book
'In a Sunday school library set up by a cotton mill fire-beater, [Thomas Thompson] read Dickens, Thackeray, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Marcus Aurelius'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Thompson Print: Book
'In [Ashington Mechanics' Institute] library [Chester Armstrong] discovered a "new world", a "larger environment" in Defoe, Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, Dickens and Jules Verne.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong Print: Book
[According to Flora Thompson], "Modern writers who speak of the booklessness of the poor at that time must mean books as possessions...there were always books to borrow"... One could borrow Pamela and the Waverley novels from a neighbour, Christies Old Organ from the Sunday School library. Her uncle, a shoemaker, had once carted home from a country-house auction a large collection of books that no-one would buy: novels, poetry, sermons, histories, dictionaries. She read him Cranford while he worked in his shop... Later she could borrow from her employer (the village postmistress) Shakespeare and Byron's Don Juan, as well as Jane Austen, Dickens and Trollope from the Mechanics' Institute library.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Flora Thompson Print: Book
Either at school or at home I read all the classics considered necessary for children: 'Treasure Island', 'Kidnapped', 'Little Women', 'David Copperfield', 'Ivanhoe', 'Robinson Crusoe'. I suppose I enjoyed them; I certainly did not resent or avoid them. Very occasionally some incident would seem to connect with my own life: the doings of the Spanish Inquisition in 'Westward Ho!' for example, fitted in exactly with what I had heard about Roman Catholics. But on the whole the themes appeared completely abstract and impersonal, even when the author intended a message to strike home. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did not cause me a moment's concern for the plight of Negro slaves in America, and neither did 'The Water Babies' for the sufferings of the child chimney-sweeps, not because these situations had been done away with, but because no book stirred me in that way...
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Patricia Beer Print: Book
'"The words I didn't understand I just skipped over, yet managed to get a good idea of what the story was about", wrote James Murray, the son of a Scottish shoemaker. "By the time I was ten or eleven years old I did not need to skip any words in any books because by then I had a good grounding in roots and derivations". Crusoe so aroused his appetite for literature that, when his schoolteacher asked the class to list all the books they had read, Murray rattled off titles by Ballantyne, Kingston and Dickens until "I realised the eyes of everyone in the room were on me..."'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: James Murray Print: Book
'George Acorn, growing up in extreme poverty in London's East End, scraped together 31/2 d to buy a used copy of David Copperfield. His parents punished him when they learned he had wasted so much money on a book, but later he read it to them: "And how we all loved it, and eventually, when we got to 'Little Em'ly', how we all cried together at poor old Peggotty's distress. The tears united us, deep in misery as we were ourselves".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Acorn Print: Book
'As a boy V.S. Pritchett read Oliver Twist "in a state of hot horror, It seized me because it was about London and the fears of the London streets. There were big boys at school who could grow up to be the Artful Dodger; many of us could have been Oliver...". Pritchett read Thackeray for escape, "a taste of the gentler life of better-off people", but in Dickens "I saw myself and my life in London".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Victor Sawdon Pritchett Print: Book
'At age sixteen, Neville Cardus (whose parents were launderers in turn of the century Manchester) read in the Athenaeum that no one was reading Dickens anymore: he trudged from one public library to another, only to be told that every copy of his novels had been loaned out. His discovery of Dickens in shilling Harmsworth editions did more than erase the boundary between fiction and life: "It was scarcely a case of reading at all; it was almost an experience of a world more alive and dimensional than this world".
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Neville Cardus Print: Book
'During these early years [Daphne du Maurier] filled her head with tales of adventure, romances, histories and popular novels, including such books as Treasure Island, The Snow Queen, The Wreck of the Grosvenor, Old St Paul's, The Tower of London, Nicholas Nickleby, Mr Midshipman Easy, Bleak House, Robinson Crusoe, The Mill on the Floss, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The seeds of her own novels were planted during these intensive, sometimes acted-out, reading sessions. The fascination with the sea, the importance of an historical sense of place, the theme of the dual personality, are all reflected in her reading during these formative years'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Daphne du Maurier Print: Book
'During these early years [Daphne du Maurier] filled her head with tales of adventure, romances, histories and popular novels, including such books as Treasure Island, The Snow Queen, The Wreck of the Grosvenor, Old St Paul's, The Tower of London, Nicholas Nickleby, Mr Midshipman Easy, Bleak House, Robinson Crusoe, The Mill on the Floss, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The seeds of her own novels were planted during these intensive, sometimes acted-out, reading sessions. The fascination with the sea, the importance of an historical sense of place, the theme of the dual personality, are all reflected in her reading during these formative years'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Daphne du Maurier Print: Book
'In the depressed steelworks town of Merthyr Tydfil between the world wars, schoolboys were baffled by A Christmas Carol: "for one thing, we never could understand why it was considered that Bob Cratchit was hard done by - a good job, we all thought he had".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Welsh schoolboys Print: Book
'In the 1920s Janet Hitchman acquired her literary education among the derelict bookshelves of an orphanage, which included a huge collection of "drunken father deathbed conversion" stories (Christie's Old Organ, 'The Little Match Girl', A Peep behind the Scenes), as well as everything by Dickens, old volumes of Punch and the Spectator and The Life of Ruskin. "My undigested reading made me look at the world with mid-Victorian eyes", she recalled'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Janet Hitchman Print: Book
[due to the fact that books in working class communities were generally cheap out of copyright reprints, not new works] Welsh collier Joseph Keating was able to immerse himself in Swift, Pope, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Dickens and Greek philosophy, as well as the John Dicks edition of Vanity Fair in weekly installments. The common denominator among these authors was that they were all dead. "Volumes by living authors were too high-priced for me", Keating explained. "Our schoolbooks never mentioned living writers; and the impression in my mind was that an author, to be a living author, must be dead and that his work was all the better if he died of neglect and starvation".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Keating Print: Book
'[the father of C.H. Rolph] read diligently through a list of the "Hundred Best Books" compiled in 1886 by Sir John Lubbock. "It included nearly all of the books that one didn't want to read or gave up if one tried", Rolph recalled: "Aristotle's Ethics, The Koran, Xenophon's Memorabilia, The Nibelunglied, Schiller's William Tell; and it ended with 'Dickens's Pickwick and David Copperfield' (only) but 'Scott's novels' (apparently the lot). For the most part they were the books which it seemed, you should expect to find in every intelligent man's private library; with, in most such libraries, their leaves uncut'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Rolph Print: Book
'[the father of C.H. Rolph] read diligently through a list of the "Hundred Best Books" compiled in 1886 by Sir John Lubbock. "It included nearly all of the books that one didn't want to read or gave up if one tried", Rolph recalled: "Aristotle's Ethics, The Koran, Xenophon's Memorabilia, The Nibelunglied, Schiller's William Tell; and it ended with 'Dickens's Pickwick and David Copperfield' (only) but 'Scott's novels' (apparently the lot). For the most part they were the books which it seemed, you should expect to find in every intelligent man's private library; with, in most such libraries, their leaves uncut'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Rolph Print: Book
'Rose... remembers her father reading to them - Dickens, Scott, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Meredith, Tom Jones, The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote, and, curiously, The Origin of Species'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Macaulay Print: Book
'When old enough to read for herself, Rose Macaulay entered into other realms of fictitious brave adventure. She devoured Masterman Ready, Ivanhoe, The Talisman, Coral Island, Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Prince and the Page
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Rose Macaulay Print: Book
[Thackeray] 'Cd not endure Bulwer - no nature - nor Dickens - yet mentioned with greatest praise the Chap: before death of little Dombey.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Makepeace Thackeray Print: Book
'[Philip Ballard] had no exposure to contemporary writers until the 1890s: "I gained a nodding acquaintance with the life and letters of Ancient Greece and Rome, and... I had read most of Dickens, much of Thackeray and some of Scott; but I had never read a line of Henry James, of Meredith or of Hardy".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Ballard Print: Book
'"Thinking back, I am amazed at the amount of English literature we absorbed in those four years", recalled Ethel Clark, a Gloucester railway worker's daughter, "and I pay tribute to the man who made it possible... Scott, Thackeray, Shakespeare, Longfellow, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rudyard Kipling were but a few authors we had at our fingertips. How he made the people live again for us!".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ethel Clark Print: Book
'The son of a barely literate Derbyshire collier recalled a sister, a worker in a hosiery factory, who was steeped in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, Keats and D.H. Lawrence. Their mother's reading "would astonish the modern candidate for honours in English at any university", he claimed. "Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgeniev, Dumas, Hugo, Thackeray, Meredith, Scott, Dickens, all the classics, poetry etc., all these gave her immense joy".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Sutton Print: Book
'Frances Stevenson, born in 1888, recollected [in The years that Are Past, 1967] that she "read greedily [pre-1914] ... I formed an early acquaintance with Dickens, weeping copiously over Little Dorrit and Little Nell, and I knew by heart many of the passages in the Ingoldsby Legends, a volume that had been given me ... when I was ten years old! ... I lost myself in a magical world while reading the poems of Scott. I think I read them all one summer holiday, in a special spot in our garden ..."'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Frances Stevenson Print: Book
'Frances Stevenson, born in 1888, recollected [in The years that Are Past, 1967] that she "read greedily [pre-1914] ... I formed an early acquaintance with Dickens, weeping copiously over Little Dorrit and Little Nell, and I knew by heart many of the passages in the Ingoldsby Legends, a volume that had been given me ... when I was ten years old! ... I lost myself in a magical world while reading the poems of Scott. I think I read them all one summer holiday, in a special spot in our garden ..."'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Frances Stevenson Print: Book
Geraldine Hodgson, The Life of James Elroy Flecker (1925), 'Reading aloud in the family circle was an established custom [in 1880s-90s] ... by a very early age, Roy had listened to large parts of Dickens, Longfellow, and Tennyson, and to much of Thackeray, George Eliot, Carlyle, and Browning.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: James Elroy Flecker Print: Book
In Scaffolding in the Sky (1938), C[harles]. H. Reilly remembered Saturday evenings when 'we all assembled round the fire to hear him [his father] read Dickens, generally, so it seems to me, scenes from Pickwick papers ... We had our favourite scenes and would beg for them time after time.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles H. Reilly Print: Book
"Robert Blatchford, growing up in Halifax in the 1860s, read from the penny library there Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Southey's Life of Nelson, Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, and novels by Captain Marryat, the Brontes, and Miss M. E. Braddon."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Blatchford Print: Book
Philip Gibbs in The Pageant of the Years (1946), on work as writer of series of articles under name "Self-Help" in early 1900s: "'All the reading I had done as a boy, all my youthful enthusiasm for Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy ... was a great source of supply now when I sat down to write aout great books ...'"
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Gibbs Print: Book
'In 1901 ... [Newman Flower] left his bed at four in the morning to travel from Croydon to watch the funeral procession of Queen Victoria. He joined the crowd, and, to pass hours of waiting, stood reading "Bleak House". A stir eventually made him look up from his book; alas, the royal section of the cortege had gone.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Newman Flower Print: Book
'It was in ... 1901 ... that Ernest Raymond as a teenager first took a Dickens from the shelf: "By the grace and favour of God, it was Pickwick Papers ... At some stage in the reading I knew with a happy breathless certainty that this was what I wanted to do with my life: to write books like this."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ernest Raymond Print: Book
'... Oliver Twist (1838), the first Dickens that A. A. Milne was exposed to, at 9, gave him nightmares.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alan Alexander Milne Print: Book
Andrew Lang, in Adventures Among Books, on being introduced to Dickens: 'I had minded my lessons, and satisfied my teachers -- I know I was reading Pinnock's "History of Rome" for pleasure -- till ... I felt a "call", and underwent a process which may be described as the opposite of "conversion". The call came from Dickens. Pickwick was brought into the house ... I read "Pickwick" in convulsions of mirth. I dropped Pinnock's "Rome" for good.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Andrew Lang Print: Book
'The first imaginative work by an Englishman ... [Joseph Conrad] read was Nicholas Nickleby (1839).'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'Devoted ... was the ritual of Gordon Hewart, who rose to become Lord Chief Justice: he read Dickens every night of his life.'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gordon Hewart Print: Book
'Neville Cardus was born in 1889 in Rusholme, Manchester, the illegitimate son of a police constable's daughter and the first violinist of a visiting orchestra. He ... ended his formal education at 13 but, from this difficult childhood, he treasured one great moment: "I discovered Charles Dickens and went crazy. I borrowed Copperfield from the Municipal Library and the ordinary universe became unreal ... I read at meals, I read in the streets; at night I would read under the lamps ... I read in bed ..."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Neville Cardus Print: Book
'Lady Cynthia Asquith, daughter of the eleventh Earl [of Elcho] ... regularly reread her favourite [Dickens] stories ...'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Cynthia Asquith Print: Book
Recorded in diary of Lady Cynthia Asquith, 15 January 1918: 'The Professor [of English Literature at Oxford, Sir Walter Raleigh] has just re-discovered Dickens -- having not touched him for years and approached him critically, he has now found himself caught up in a flame of love and admiration ...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh Print: Book
'Both ... [Elizabeth and Alice Thompson] were reading voraciously at that time [1854-57] ... guided by ... [their father] they were ranging ... through the works of Dickens, Scott, Trollope, and Jane Austen. Much of what they read was advanced fare for children of nine and ten ...'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thompson Family Print: Book
June Badeni on readings by 13-year-old Alice Thompson, as recorded in her notebook: 'She has been reading more of Scott and Dickens, is plunging through the novels of George Eliot... has sampled Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Thompson Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Private in an infantry regiment, formerly a skilled painter, age eighteen. Spends evenings painting, reading, working on model airplanes. Has attended art school....Patronizes Free Library. Has read The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Bulwer Lytton, Ballantyne, Henty, Robinson Crusoe, Quentin Dirward, Ivanhoe, Waverley, Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Two Years before the Mast, as well as the travels of David Livingstone, Fridtjof Nansen, Matthew Peary and Scott of the Antarctic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Private in an infantry regiment, formerly a skilled painter, age eighteen. Spends evenings painting, reading, working on model airplanes. Has attended art school....Patronizes Free Library. Has read The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Bulwer Lytton, Ballantyne, Henty, Robinson Crusoe, Quentin Dirward, Ivanhoe, Waverley, Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Two Years before the Mast, as well as the travels of David Livingstone, Fridtjof Nansen, Matthew Peary and Scott of the Antarctic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Private in an infantry regiment, formerly a skilled painter, age eighteen. Spends evenings painting, reading, working on model airplanes. Has attended art school....Patronizes Free Library. Has read The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Bulwer Lytton, Ballantyne, Henty, Robinson Crusoe, Quentin Dirward, Ivanhoe, Waverley, Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Two Years before the Mast, as well as the travels of David Livingstone, Fridtjof Nansen, Matthew Peary and Scott of the Antarctic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Engine tenter, age twenty-seven...Often attends operas...Methodically building up a personal library following the guidelines of Arnold Bennett's Literary Taste. Has read the Bible, Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing), Pope, Tennyson, Masefield, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Emerson, William Morris, most of Ruskin, Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol), The Cloister and the Hearth, GK Chesterton, Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Man and Superman, The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, The Devil's Disciple, You Never Can Tell, Socialism and Superior Brains, Fabian Essays, An Unsocial Socialist, The Irrational Knot), John Galsworthy, about a dozen books by H.G. Wells and perhaps twenty by Bennett, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy and other books on trade unionism, Sir Oliver Lodge, Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy and The Intermediate Sex, J.A. Hobson and Alfred Marshall on Economics and Plato's Republic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Engine tenter, age twenty-seven...Often attends operas...Methodically building up a personal library following the guidelines of Arnold Bennett's Literary Taste. Has read the Bible, Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing), Pope, Tennyson, Masefield, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Emerson, William Morris, most of Ruskin, Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol), The Cloister and the Hearth, GK Chesterton, Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Man and Superman, The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, The Devil's Disciple, You Never Can Tell, Socialism and Superior Brains, Fabian Essays, An Unsocial Socialist, The Irrational Knot), John Galsworthy, about a dozen books by H.G. Wells and perhaps twenty by Bennett, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy and other books on trade unionism, Sir Oliver Lodge, Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy and The Intermediate Sex, J.A. Hobson and Alfred Marshall on Economics and Plato's Republic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Engine tenter, age twenty-seven...Often attends operas...Methodically building up a personal library following the guidelines of Arnold Bennett's Literary Taste. Has read the Bible, Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing), Pope, Tennyson, Masefield, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Emerson, William Morris, most of Ruskin, Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol), The Cloister and the Hearth, GK Chesterton, Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Man and Superman, The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, The Devil's Disciple, You Never Can Tell, Socialism and Superior Brains, Fabian Essays, An Unsocial Socialist, The Irrational Knot), John Galsworthy, about a dozen books by H.G. Wells and perhaps twenty by Bennett, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy and other books on trade unionism, Sir Oliver Lodge, Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy and The Intermediate Sex, J.A. Hobson and Alfred Marshall on Economics and Plato's Republic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Engine tenter, age twenty-seven...Often attends operas...Methodically building up a personal library following the guidelines of Arnold Bennett's Literary Taste. Has read the Bible, Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing), Pope, Tennyson, Masefield, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Emerson, William Morris, most of Ruskin, Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol), The Cloister and the Hearth, GK Chesterton, Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Man and Superman, The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, The Devil's Disciple, You Never Can Tell, Socialism and Superior Brains, Fabian Essays, An Unsocial Socialist, The Irrational Knot), John Galsworthy, about a dozen books by H.G. Wells and perhaps twenty by Bennett, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy and other books on trade unionism, Sir Oliver Lodge, Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy and The Intermediate Sex, J.A. Hobson and Alfred Marshall on Economics and Plato's Republic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Engine tenter, age twenty-seven...Often attends operas...Methodically building up a personal library following the guidelines of Arnold Bennett's Literary Taste. Has read the Bible, Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing), Pope, Tennyson, Masefield, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Emerson, William Morris, most of Ruskin, Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol), The Cloister and the Hearth, GK Chesterton, Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Man and Superman, The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, The Devil's Disciple, You Never Can Tell, Socialism and Superior Brains, Fabian Essays, An Unsocial Socialist, The Irrational Knot), John Galsworthy, about a dozen books by H.G. Wells and perhaps twenty by Bennett, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy and other books on trade unionism, Sir Oliver Lodge, Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy and The Intermediate Sex, J.A. Hobson and Alfred Marshall on Economics and Plato's Republic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Engine tenter, age twenty-seven...Often attends operas...Methodically building up a personal library following the guidelines of Arnold Bennett's Literary Taste. Has read the Bible, Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing), Pope, Tennyson, Masefield, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Emerson, William Morris, most of Ruskin, Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol), The Cloister and the Hearth, GK Chesterton, Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Man and Superman, The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, The Devil's Disciple, You Never Can Tell, Socialism and Superior Brains, Fabian Essays, An Unsocial Socialist, The Irrational Knot), John Galsworthy, about a dozen books by H.G. Wells and perhaps twenty by Bennett, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy and other books on trade unionism, Sir Oliver Lodge, Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy and The Intermediate Sex, J.A. Hobson and Alfred Marshall on Economics and Plato's Republic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Machinist in a shell factory, age twenty-four... Has read Shakespeare, Burns, Keats, Scott, Tennyson, Dickens, Vanity Fair, The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, biography and history'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Machine file cutter, age twenty-five... Has read The Old Curiosity Shop, Innocents Abroad, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Bible'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Housewife, age twenty-eight... Has read "David Copperfield", "The Old Curiosity Shop", "Lorna Doone", Louisa May Alcott and the travels of Livingstone and Darwin'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Housewife, age twenty-eight... Has read "David Copperfield", "The Old Curiosity Shop", "Lorna Doone", Louisa May Alcott and the travels of Livingstone and Darwin'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Cutlery worker, age seventy-two...Fond of Longfellow, Stevenson, Ruskin, William Morris and Charles Dickens'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
'Theodore Watts-Dunton remembers Algernon Swinburne's fondness for reading aloud during his last years at Watts-Dunton's home: "... he would read for the hour together from Dickens, Lamb, Charles Reade and Thackeray."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Algernon Swinburne Print: Unknown
'Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer ... liked to get away from political anxieties by devouring what he called "shilling shockers": adventure stories, American westerns, and thrillers, though he would occasionally leaven the mixture by rereading Dickens and what he considered the erotic passages of Byron, Milton and Burns. He did latch on to some best-sellers, such as Jeffrey Farnol's The Amateur Gentleman (1913), which he read "over and over again" ...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lloyd George Print: Book
'On learning that [Hall] Caine was to present twenty-four lectures in Liverpool on "Prose Fiction" ... [D. G. Rossetti] insisted that he read the works [of English novelists] aloud to him; hence "I read Fielding and Smollett, Richardson, Radcliffe, 'Monk' Lewis, Thackeray and Dickens, under a running fire of comment and criticism from Rossetti".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Hall Caine Print: Book
'I don't dare to work any more tonight. That is why I asked for another Dickens; if I read him in bed he diverts my mind.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Mansfield Print: Book
'Jinne Moore was awfully good at elocution. Was she better than I? I could make the girls cry when I read Dickens in the sewing class, and she couldn't.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Mansfield Print: Book
'When Florence Murray married in 1902, her husband, a Colne valley wool manufacturer, was a widower with a young son ... who was looked after by an aged housekeeper ['an extra particular Baptist'] ... one wet afternoon Florence "took "David Copperfield" from the bookshelf and boldly began to read it aloud to her while she knitted. She disapproved of novels, but I represented it as Dickens' life ... the old lady was greatly interested and amused ..."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Florence Murray Print: Book
'[Davies said] "Before I was twelve I had developed an appreciation of good prose, and the Bible created in me a zest for literature", propelling him directly to Lamb, Hazlitt's Essays and Ruskin's The Crown of Wild Olives. Later... he joined the library committee of the Miners' Institute in Maesteg, made friends with the librarian, and advised him on acquisitions. Thus he could read all the books he wanted: Marx, Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marshall, economic and trade union history, Fabian Essays, Thomas Hardy, Meredith, Kipling and Dickens'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: D.R. Davies Print: Book
'The novels of Scott and Dickens had long been her favourite reading, but of late years she had become interested in the work of George Borrow, a Norfolk man who had recently gained a certain measure of fame.'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Amelia Opie Print: Book
'Next to Robinson Crusoe, Rider liked the Arabian Nights, The Three Musketeers and the poems of Edgar Allan Poe and Macaulay. His two favourite novels were Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities and The Coming Race, a fantasy novel by Bulwer Lytton (the uncle of Sir Henry Bulwer, a Norfolk neighbour and friend of Squire Haggard who was to play a decisive part in Rider's life).'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Rider Haggard Print: Book
'[Helen Crawfurd] derived lessons in socialism and feminism from Carlyle, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Ibsen's Ghosts and A Doll's House, Dickens, Disraeli's Sybil, Mary Barton, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Under the Greenwood Tree, Tennyson's The Princess, Longfellow, Whitman, Burns, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, George Sand, the Brontes, Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Helen Crawfurd Print: Book
[Communist activists often displayed hostility to literature, including Willie Gallacher. However his 'hostility to literature abated' in later years and in his later memoirs] 'he confessed a liking for Burns, Scott, the Brontes, Mrs Gaskell, children's comics and Olivier's film of Hamlet... Of course he admired Dickens, and not only the obvious Oliver Twist: the communist MP was prepared to admit that he appreciated the satire of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William Gallacher Print: Book
[Communist activists often displayed hostility to literature, including Willie Gallacher. However his 'hostility to literature abated' in later years and in his later memoirs] 'he confessed a liking for Burns, Scott, the Brontes, Mrs Gaskell, children's comics and Olivier's film of Hamlet... Of course he admired Dickens, and not only the obvious Oliver Twist: the communist MP was prepared to admit that he appreciated the satire of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William Gallacher Print: Book
'[In The Saturday Review, 19 November 1904], "A Mother" records the books consumed since July by her sixteen-year-old daughter ... [who is] on the point of going in for the "Senior Cambridge" ... :
"Old Mortality", "The Farringdons", "By Mutual Consent" (L. T. Meade), "To Call Her Mine", "Kathrine Regina", and "Self or Bearer" (Besant); "Christmas Carol", "The Cricket on the Hearth", "Hypatia", "Concerning Isabel Carnaby", "The Virginians", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "The Head of the House" (E. Everett-Green), "A Double Thread", "The Heir-Presumptive and the Heir-Apparent", "Sesame and Lilies", "A Tale of Two Cities".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
'[In The Saturday Review, 19 November 1904], "A Mother" records the books consumed since July by her sixteen-year-old daughter ... [who is] on the point of going in for the "Senior Cambridge" ... :
"Old Mortality", "The Farringdons", "By Mutual Consent" (L. T. Meade), "To Call Her Mine", "Kathrine Regina", and "Self or Bearer" (Besant); "Christmas Carol", "The Cricket on the Hearth", "Hypatia", "Concerning Isabel Carnaby", "The Virginians", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "The Head of the House" (E. Everett-Green), "A Double Thread", "The Heir-Presumptive and the Heir-Apparent", "Sesame and Lilies", "A Tale of Two Cities".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
'[In The Saturday Review, 19 November 1904], "A Mother" records the books consumed since July by her sixteen-year-old daughter ... [who is] on the point of going in for the "Senior Cambridge" ... :
"Old Mortality", "The Farringdons", "By Mutual Consent" (L. T. Meade), "To Call Her Mine", "Kathrine Regina", and "Self or Bearer" (Besant); "Christmas Carol", "The Cricket on the Hearth", "Hypatia", "Concerning Isabel Carnaby", "The Virginians", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "The Head of the House" (E. Everett-Green), "A Double Thread", "The Heir-Presumptive and the Heir-Apparent", "Sesame and Lilies", "A Tale of Two Cities".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Print: Book
Mary Paley Marshall, "What I Remember" (1947), on family ban on Dickens: 'I was grown up before I read "David Copperfield" and then it had to be in secret' (p.7).'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Paley Marshall Print: Book
"Forbidden David Copperfield, Bleak House, The Heart of Midlothian, and The Vicar of Wakefield ... [H. M. Swanwick] read them none the less ... When she was lent Dante Gabriel Rosetti's poems by a friend, 'Jenny' ... came as a welcome antidote [to Dickens's and Scott's treatments of fallen women]."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: H. M. Swanwick Print: Unknown
"Forbidden David Copperfield, Bleak House, The Heart of Midlothian, and The Vicar of Wakefield ... [H. M. Swanwick] read them none the less ... When she was lent Dante Gabriel Rosetti's poems by a friend, 'Jenny' ... came as a welcome antidote [to Dickens's and Scott's treatments of fallen women]."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: H. M. Swanwick Print: Unknown
"Vera Brittain's far from bookish home contained, in addition to the yellow-back novels which formed the main staple of her early reading, a volume entitled Household Medicine: 'the treatment of infectious diseases left me cold, but I was secretly excited at the prospect of menstruation; I also found the details of confinement quite enthralling.' She added the knowledge thus gained to other sources, recalling 'that intensive searching for obstetrical details through the Bible and such school-library novels as David Copperfield and Adam Bede which appears to have been customary almost everywhere among the adolescents of my generation.'"
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
"Alice Foley's father was an often drunk, sometimes violent Irish factory worker in Bolton, but when 'in sober mood, he read aloud to the family the novels of Dickens and George Eliot'."
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
'Though miners' MP Robert Smillie surreptitiously gorged on Dick Turpin and Three Fingered Jack as a boy, they... "led to better things": by fourteen he had seen RIchard III, read some of the Sonnets, discovered Burns, Scott and Dickens.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Smillie Print: Book
'"[Penny dreadfuls] were thrilling, absolutely without sex interest, and of a high moral standard", explained London hatmaker Frederick Willis. "No boy would be any the worse for reading them and in many cases they encouraged and developed a love of reading that led him onwards and upwards on the fascinating path of literature. It was the beloved 'bloods' that first stimulated my love of reading, and from them I set out on the road to Shaw and Wells, Thackeray and Dickens, Fielding, Shakespeare and Chaucer".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Frederick Willis Print: Book
'[Edwin] Whitlock... borrowed books from a schoolmaster and from neighbours: "Most of them would now be considered very heavy literature for a boy of fourteen or fifteen, but I didn't know that, for I had no light literature for comparison. I read most of the novels of Dickens, Scott, Lytton and Mrs Henry Wood, 'The Pilgrim's Progress' and 'The Holy War' - an illustrated guide to Biblical Palestine, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', several bound volumes of religious magazines, 'The Adventures of a Penny', and sundry similar classics". With few books competing for his attention, he could freely concentrate on his favorite reading, "A set of twelve thick volumes of Cassell's 'History of England'".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Whitlock Print: Book
'James Williams admitted that, growing up in rural Wales, "I'd read anything rather than not read at all. I read a great deal of rubbish, and books that were too 'old', or too 'young' for me". He consumed the Gem, Magnet and Sexton Blake as well as the standard boys' authors (Henty, Ballantyne, Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, Twain) but also Dickens, Scott, Trollope, the Brontes, George Eliot, even Prescott's "The Conquest of Peru" and "The Conquest of Mexico". He picked "The Canterbury Tales" out of an odd pile of used books for sale, gradually puzzled out the Middle English, and eventually adopted Chaucer as his favourite poet'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: James Williams Print: Book
I am glad you like The Black Veil. I think that the title is a good one, because it is uncommon, and does not impair the interest of the story by partially explaining its main feature.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Macrone Print: Unknown
Jonathan Rose, "How Historians Study Reader Response: or, What did Jo Think of Bleak House?": "George Acorn recalled that, growing up in extreme poverty in London's East End, he scraped up 3 1/2d to buy a used copy of David Copperfield. His parents soundly thrashed him when they learned he had wasted so much money on a book, but later he read it to them:
"'And how we all loved it ... how we all cried together at poor old Peggotty's distress!'"
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Acorn Print: Book
Jonathan Rose, "How Historians Study Reader Response: or, What did Jo Think of Bleak House?": "Arthur Harding, a professional criminal who grew up in the East End slum known as 'the Jago,' was quite impressed by A Tale of Two Cities and Dombey and Son when he read them in prison ..."
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Harding Print: Book
Jonathan Rose, "How Historians Study Reader Response: or, What did Jo Think of Bleak House?": "Arthur Harding, a professional criminal who grew up in the East End slum known as 'the Jago,' was quite impressed by A Tale of Two Cities and Dombey and Son when he read them in prison ..."
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Harding Print: Book
Jonathan Rose, "How Historians Study Reader Response: or, What did Jo Think of Bleak House?": " ... some of ... [Dickens's readers] found it difficult to share his anguish over the hardships of the clerkly classes. Growing up in the depressed steelworks town of Merthyr Tydfil between the world wars, some poor schoolboys were a bit baffled when their teacher read them A Christmas Carol: ' ... we never could understand why it was considered why Bob Cratchit was hard done by -- a good job, we all thought he had.'"
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
'Stella Davies's father would read to his children from the Bible, "Pilgrim's Progress", Walter Scott, Longfellow, Tennyson, Dickens, "The Cloister and the Hearth", and Pope's translation of the "Iliad", though not in their entirety: "Extracts suitable to our ages were read and explained and, when we younger ones had been packed off to bed, more serious and inclusive reading would begin... We younger ones often dipped into books farf beyond our understanding. It did us no harm, I believe, for we skipped a lot and took what we could from the rest".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Stella Davies Print: Book
'[Neville] Cardus read only boys' papers until quite suddenly, in adolescence, he dove into Dickens and Mark Twain. "Then, without scarcely a bridge-passage, I was deep in the authors who to this day I regard the best discovered in a lifetime" - Fielding, Browning, Hardy, Tolstoy, even Henry James. He found them all before he was twenty, with critical guidance from no one: "We must make our own soundings and chartings in the arts... so that we may all one day climb to our own peak, silent in Darien".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Neville Cardus Print: Book
'After a miserable Catholic school education...periodic unemployment allowed [Joseph Toole] to study in the Manchester Reference Library. There he discovered, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Mill, Emerson, Dickens, Morris, Blatchford, Shaw and Wells, and of course John Ruskin..."Study always left me with a deep feeling that there was so much amiss with the world. It seemed that it had been started at the wrong end, and that it was everybody's business to put the matter right".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Toole Print: Book
'Before his departure for his native land he had read some of Dickens and Stevenson... and William Morris. John Masefield's debt to William Morris as a constructive thinker is considerable. It may be that Morris has been the formative influence, in his limitations as well as his liberations, on Masefield's view of life'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Masefield Print: Book
'[Howard] Spring was the son of a Cardiff gardener who bought his children secondhand copies of "Tom Jones" and "Swiss Family Robinson", and read aloud from "Pilgrim's Progress", "Robinson Crusoe" and Charles Dickens'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Spring Print: Book
'David Copperfield was puzzling, too. He was a 'posthumous child' and was born with a 'caul'. The French dictionary, the only one I had, gave posthumous; posthume, which did not help me much; but for caul it gave fillet, and of course a fillet was a string bag. How very odd. Then someone gave me a present of Esmond; but my mother said I was not to read it, because parts of it were "not very nice". Of course I wanted to find out what was not nice about it; so, by a quibble, I decided that I might read all that I could manage without cutting the pages. With industry and perseverance this meant practically all of it, though the pages were not cut for many a long year. But I could never discover what was wrong with it'.
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gwen Raverat Print: Book
'Along with her old school books [Maud Montgomery] read whatever she could find both for pleasure and to learn from their authors how to improve her own writing: religious tracts, newspapers, the Godey's Lady's Book, Charles Dickens's "Pickwick Papers", Sir Walter Scott's novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables", Washington Irving's "The Sketch Book", and Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Maud Montgomery Print: Book
[List of books read during 1944]:
'The Specialist; All This and Heaven Too; Antony; Uncle Tom's Cabin; Roper's Row; Tom Brown's Schooldays; Life's a Circus; The Keys of the Kingdom; Two Survived; Hamlet; King's Nurse, Beggar's Nurse; The Snow Goose; Gerald; Early Stages; Cross Creek; Footnotes to the Ballet; The Great Ship; Hungry Hill; Hiawatha; Captain Blood; Scaramouche; Heartbreak House; Fortune's Fool; Fifth Form at St Dominic's; Cold Comfort Farm; The Lost King; The count of Monte Cristo; Diary of a Provincial Lady; Frenchman's Creek; Song of Bernadette; Romeo and Juliet; Rebecca; The Surgeon's Destiny; The Killer and the Slain; Anna; King Solomon's Mines; The Black Moth; Have His Carcase; Peacock Pie; Alice in Wonderland; The Citadel; Good Companions; Our Hearts were Young and Gay; Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man; The Healing Knife; First Year Out; Saint Joan; Stars Look Down; Bridge of San Luis Rey; Rogue Herries; Caesar and Cleopatra; Xmas at Cold Comfort Farm; Dark Lady of the Sonnets; The Velvet Deer; Leaves from a Surgeon's Case Book; A Christmas Carol; Craft of Comedy; As You Like It; Lottie Dundass; Plays of John Galsworthy; Provincial Lady in America; She Shanties; Peter Abelard; Actor, Soldier, Poet; The Best of Lamb; Some Essay of Elia; Poems, Plays etc; The White Cliffs; Three Men in a Boat; Confessions of an Opium Eater; In Search of England; Wuthering Heights; Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Poems of Contemporary Women; Crime at the Club; Quality Street; Villette; Major Barbara; Pygmalion; You Never Can Tell; King John; Doctor's Dilemma'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding Print: Book
'Rudie inspired in all his children a love of literature, reading aloud to them from his own favourites, the great Victorians, particularly Dickens, and helping them to choose from the library shelves. "I had the run of my father's library", Rosamond remembered. "I was allowed to read anything and did". There was a bookcase in the hall where he would put books sent to him for review, and from these Rosamond, graduating from her beloved Hans Andersen, E. Nesbit and Les Petites Filles Modeles, began to discover some of the more adult novelists'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Rudolph Lehmann Print: Book
?This period gave me unnumbered hours for reading, and I devoured everything that came in my way, novels, histories, travels, even "The lives of the Stoics". There was no such thing as a free library then, so enough money was scraped up for a subscription one, the first volume borrowed being Dickens?s newly published "Bleak House".?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Catling Print: Book
?There were no free libraries, so the younger hands joined with me in starting a "Literary Fund" of our own, towards which each paid three-halfpence a week. The papers and books bought for general reading were afterwards divided. In our little club the "Cornhill Magazine", from its start under Thackeray?s editorship, was read and discussed; also Dickens?s successive productions. I call to mind many serious books, as well as "Cassell?s Magazine" and the "London Journal", in which appeared Miss Braddon?s great story of "Henry Dunbar", then entitled "The Outcasts".?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Printers and compositors at Thomas Catling's place of work, Edward Lloyd's publishing house Print: Book, Serial / periodical, presumably Dickens's fiction and journals
?We even formed a magazine club ? purchasing periodicals, reading them in turn, and then distributing them among the members. Thackeray?s "Virginians" and Dickens?s "Little Dorrit" were, I recollect, among the serials for which we subscribed.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Adams and colleagues at the office of the 'Illustrated Times' Print: Serial / periodical
'We have been reading the last two evenings, the Christmas number of Household Words - "Perils of Certain English Prisoners" - by Wilkie Collins and Dickens. I am reading "Die Familie" by Riehl, forming the third volume of the series, the two first of which "Land und Volk" and "Die Burgerliche Gesellschaft", I reviewed for the Westminster'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot and G.H. Lewes Print: Serial / periodical
'G. returned from Vernon Hill, and I read to him, after the review of my book in the "Times", the delicious scenes at Tetterby's with the "Moloch of a baby" in "the Haunted Man".'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot (pseud) Print: Unknown, could have been book or serial
March 16, 1884 [Lisbon] 'I am now reading to C.S. [Charles Schreiber] that charming book Rob Roy. Scott never palls. In the steamer we amused ourselves with Barnaby Rudge and the Old Curiosity Shop, which, with Pickwick which we read at Ceres, is enough of Dickens for the present. C. S. likes my reading, and it has the blessed effect of often sending him to sleep, when he seems indisposed and restless.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Schreiber Print: Book
March 16, 1884 [Lisbon] 'I am now reading to C.S. [Charles Schreiber] that charming book Rob Roy. Scott never palls. In the steamer we amused ourselves with Barnaby Rudge and the Old Curiosity Shop, which, with Pickwick which we read at Ceres, is enough of Dickens for the present. C. S. likes my reading, and it has the blessed effect of often sending him to sleep, when he seems indisposed and restless.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Schreiber Print: Book
March 16, 1884 [Lisbon] 'I am now reading to C.S. [Charles Schreiber] that charming book Rob Roy. Scott never palls. In the steamer we amused ourselves with Barnaby Rudge and the Old Curiosity Shop, which, with Pickwick which we read at Ceres, is enough of Dickens for the present. C. S. likes my reading, and it has the blessed effect of often sending him to sleep, when he seems indisposed and restless.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Schreiber Print: Book
'I read aloud No. 3 of "Edwin Drood".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud.] Print: Serial / periodical
'The only social event she goes to is the Sunday afternoon tea run by her chapel. Again she has not made many friends here, but she seems to enjoy going. Apart from that, she spends her evenings writing letters, sewing, and reading. Molly reads
far more than most of the girls-she always brings a book to read in the canteen. She does not just read idly for pleasure, but has a real thought-out attitude toward it, and regards it as a worthwhile occupation. At the time of writing she is reading "A Tale of Two Cities", and intends to have read the whole of Dickens by the end of the summer.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Molly Print: Book
'on his eighth birthday, 27 February 1920, an ox-cart drew up outside Everleas Lodge with a present for him - a huge parcel of books. His father had bought him a complete set of Dickens which had belonged to a recently expired tea-planter. Durrell claimed later that he never got beyond the Pickwick Papers (sometimes he said that he got through about ten of them), but Dickens gave him a vision of merrie England... supplemented later by reading Thackeray and R.S. Surtees. In Surtees' convivial tales of the hunting, shooting, sporting Mr Jorrocks and his pursuitful adventures, there was something ruddy, jolly and rumbustious, which appealed to the perky youngster'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lawrence Durrell Print: Book
'I will not tell you my exact state of health day by day, but will give you a diary of my reading, which is perhaps a good index of my physical state.
Friday morning. Full of buck. "Tartarin sur les Alpes".
Friday afternoon. Wanted soothing. "Letters from a Silent Study".
Saturday morning. Very depressed. "Pickwick Papers".
Saturday afternoon. A little better. "Esmond".
Sunday morning. Quite well thank you! "Butler's Analogy".
Sunday afternoon. Quite well thank you! "Esmond and Stonewall Jackson".
As a guide I may point out that "Pickwick" cheers me up when I am most depressed, while "Butler's Analogy" taxes all my strength.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Donald William Alers Hankey Print: Book
'In future I hope that instead of saying as the fat boy in "Pickwick" does "I wants to make yer flesh creep," when I have a "liver" my letters will be particularly cheerful!'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Donald William Alers Hankey Print: Book
'When in years to come, I read "Dombey and Son", certain features of Mrs Pipchin did irresistibly remind me of my excellent past governess.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Edmund Gosse Print: Book
'...but she procured for me a copy of "Pickwick", by which I was instantly and gloriously enslaved. My shouts of laughing at the richer passages were almost scandalous, and led to my being reproved for disturbing my Father while engaged, in an upper room, in the study of God's Word. I must have expended months on the perusal of "Pickwick", for I used to rush through a chapter, and then read it over again very slowly, word for word, and then shut my eyes to realise the figures and the action...[more..]'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Edmund Gosse Print: Book
'We had met Dickens before, but only "The Old Curiosity Shop" and "The Chimes", both of which, in their mean little school editions, were enough to sour a boy against the novels for the rest of his life.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'We had met Dickens before, but only "The Old Curiosity Shop" and "The Chimes", both of which, in their mean little school editions, were enough to sour a boy against the novels for the rest of his life.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'Mr Wilson had no more patience than we had with Little Nell and the atrocious Trotty Veck. He shovelled the sentiment and the trushery behind him, and started straight off with "Pickwick Papers". "Pickwick" is not a very mature Dickens and not very mature humour, but it semmed to us quite the funniest book we had ever met.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Walter Wilson Print: Book
'I do not know whether Mr Wilson read "Pickwick" right through, but I certainly did. My copy bears a plate inside the cover [school prize details]... It was the first of a succession of Dickens volumes on Indian paper, in stiff blue covers, with the original Phiz and Seymour illustrations. In 1926, at the Secondary School, I received "Barnaby Rudge"; in 1927, "Dombey and Son"; in 1928, "Nicholas Nickleby". "Great Expectations, which followed "Pickwick" in Mr Wilson's scheme, I acquired in the red, cardboard-backed Nelson's Classics, price One Shilling and Sixpence, a series which became my regular source of Christmas and birthday presents from uncles and friends... These books were my winter reading between the ages of ten and fourteen... [continues]'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Walter Wilson Print: Book
'I do not know whether Mr Wilson read "Pickwick" right through, but I certainly did. My copy bears a plate inside the cover [school prize details]... It was the first of a succession of Dickens volumes on Indian paper, in stiff blue covers, with the original Phiz and Seymour illustrations. In 1926, at the Secondary School, I received "Barnaby Rudge"; in 1927, "Dombey and Son"; in 1928, "Nicholas Nickleby". "Great Expectations, which followed "Pickwick" in Mr Wilson's scheme, I acquired in the red, cardboard-backed Nelson's Classics, price One Shilling and Sixpence, a series which became my regular source of Christmas and birthday presents from uncles and friends... These books were my winter reading between the ages of ten and fourteen... [continues]'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'I do not know whether Mr Wilson read "Pickwick" right through, but I certainly did. My copy bears a plate inside the cover [school prize details]... It was the first of a succession of Dickens volumes on Indian paper, in stiff blue covers, with the original Phiz and Seymour illustrations. In 1926, at the Secondary School, I received "Barnaby Rudge"; in 1927, "Dombey and Son"; in 1928, "Nicholas Nickleby". "Great Expectations, which followed "Pickwick" in Mr Wilson's scheme, I acquired in the red, cardboard-backed Nelson's Classics, price One Shilling and Sixpence, a series which became my regular source of Christmas and birthday presents from uncles and friends... These books were my winter reading between the ages of ten and fourteen... [continues]'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'I do not know whether Mr Wilson read "Pickwick" right through, but I certainly did. My copy bears a plate inside the cover [school prize details]... It was the first of a succession of Dickens volumes on Indian paper, in stiff blue covers, with the original Phiz and Seymour illustrations. In 1926, at the Secondary School, I received "Barnaby Rudge"; in 1927, "Dombey and Son"; in 1928, "Nicholas Nickleby". "Great Expectations, which followed "Pickwick" in Mr Wilson's scheme, I acquired in the red, cardboard-backed Nelson's Classics, price One Shilling and Sixpence, a series which became my regular source of Christmas and birthday presents from uncles and friends... These books were my winter reading between the ages of ten and fourteen... [discusses at length the realism he found in the Phiz illustrations for "Dombey and Son": 'I would pick up my book sometimes and try to read by the glow from the coals, and the world I entered seemed not too far removed from the world I left. It was no more walking from one room into the next.']
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'I do not know whether Mr Wilson read "Pickwick" right through, but I certainly did. My copy bears a plate inside the cover [school prize details]... It was the first of a succession of Dickens volumes on Indian paper, in stiff blue covers, with the original Phiz and Seymour illustrations. In 1926, at the Secondary School, I received "Barnaby Rudge"; in 1927, "Dombey and Son"; in 1928, "Nicholas Nickleby". "Great Expectations, which followed "Pickwick" in Mr Wilson's scheme, I acquired in the red, cardboard-backed Nelson's Classics, price One Shilling and Sixpence, a series which became my regular source of Christmas and birthday presents from uncles and friends... These books were my winter reading between the ages of ten and fourteen... [continues]'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'I do not know whether Mr Wilson read "Pickwick" right through, but I certainly did. My copy bears a plate inside the cover [school prize details]... It was the first of a succession of Dickens volumes on Indian paper, in stiff blue covers, with the original Phiz and Seymour illustrations. In 1926, at the Secondary School, I received "Barnaby Rudge"; in 1927, "Dombey and Son"; in 1928, "Nicholas Nickleby". "Great Expectations, which followed "Pickwick" in Mr Wilson's scheme, I acquired in the red, cardboard-backed Nelson's Classics, price One Shilling and Sixpence, a series which became my regular source of Christmas and birthday presents from uncles and friends... These books were my winter reading between the ages of ten and fourteen... [continues]'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'So that, whatever may have been its deeper cause, the love which filled my imagination was of a kind that seemed, to me, to have little to do with what I meant by sex. "Love" was something I had learned about from "David Copperfield" and "Under the Greenwood Tree" and from the stories in "The Woman's Weekly", which my mother occasionally bought. And of course, from the poetry I was beginning to enjoy. I was naively oblivious to the sexual innuendoes of Keats and Tennyson but their romantic raptures set me trembling like a tuning fork. "Come into the garden, Maud" roused nothing of the derision, or even downright ribaldry, that it would surely rouse in a boy of today.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'It [central London] was truly a wonder world, for I seeing it not merely with my eyes of flesh but with the eyes of heightened imagination; -seeing it not only through spectacles manufactured by an optician, but through glasses supplied by magicians names Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, William Makepeace Thackeray, Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Toby Smollett, Sam Johnson and Will Shakespeare himself. Had I scraped an acquaintance with all these before I was fifteen? I knew them well! -and that was the trouble. I was book hungry, and I found a land where books were accessible in a quantity and variety sufficient to satisfy even my uncontrolled voracity.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas A. Jackson Print: Book
'Later on I found at the bottom of a cupboard some old volumes -Addison's "Spectator", Pope's "Homer", and a few other things. My grandmother -who also devoured books in great gulps -gave me a "Robinson Crusoe", and lent me volumes containing four "Waverley Novels" apiece. Much about the same time my father got bound up a set of Dickens's novels he had bought in weekly parts. They were in the popular quarto edition with drawings by Fred Barnard, John Mahony and others. These were a real treasure -and all the more so as my father was an ardent Dickens "fan" who rather despised Scott as a "romantic" and a "Tory". His mother (born in 1815, so old enough to have read the "Waverley Novels" when they were still comparatively new things) rather sniffed at Dickens, and definitely preferred both Scott and Thackeray. She gave me "Vanity Fair" as an antidote to "David Copperfield" and added a Shakespeare, and a bundle of "paperback" editions -Fielding, Smollett, Fennimore Cooper and Captain Marryatt.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas A. Jackson Print: Book, Serial / periodical, weekly parts collected by father and bound into four volumes
'Later on I found at the bottom of a cupboard some of volumes -Addison's "Spectator", Pope's "Homer", and a few other things. My grandmother -who also devoured books in great gulps -gave me a "Robinson Crusoe", and lent me volumes containing four "Waverley Novels" apiece. Much about the same time my father got bound up a set of Dickens's novels he had bought in weekly parts. They were in the popular quarto edition with drawings by Fred Barnard, John Mahony and others. These were a real treasure -and all the more so as my father was an ardent Dickens "fan" who rather despised Scott as a "romantic" and a "Tory". His mother (born in 1815, so old enough to have read the "Waverley Novels" when they were still comparatively new things) rather sniffed at Dickens, and definitely preferred both Scott and Thackeray. She gave me "Vanity Fair" as an antidote to "David Copperfield" and added a Shakespeare, and a bundle of "paperback" editions -Fielding, Smollett, Fennimore Cooper and Captain Marryatt.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Jackson Print: Book, Serial / periodical, weekly parts collected and bound into four volumes
'Later on I found at the bottom of a cupboard some of volumes -Addison's "Spectator", Pope's "Homer", and a few other things. My grandmother -who also devoured books in great gulps -gave me a "Robinson Crusoe", and lent me volumes containing four "Waverley Novels" apiece. Much about the same time my father got bound up a set of Dickens's novels he had bought in weekly parts. They were in the popular quarto edition with drawings by Fred Barnard, John Mahony and others. These were a real treasure -and all the more so as my father was an ardent Dickens "fan" who rather despised Scott as a "romantic" and a "Tory". His mother (born in 1815, so old enough to have read the "Waverley Novels" when they were still comparatively new things) rather sniffed at Dickens, and definitely preferred both Scott and Thackeray. She gave me "Vanity Fair" as an antidote to "David Copperfield" and added a Shakespeare, and a bundle of "paperback" editions -Fielding, Smollett, Fennimore Cooper and Captain Marryatt.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas A. Jackson Print: Book, Serial / periodical, weekly parts collected by father and bound into volumes
[I read] 'Good books - Dickens, and Scott, and all that, but I don't believe I've opened a book since I got married, and that's nearly 30 years now.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
'Modern writers may not be up to the standard of the old writers, Dickens, Thackeray and Scott, but they're snappy-they're quick reading." (Man
45, borrowing Death in Downing Street, by J. G. Brandon.)'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
?I regret to see one or two errors in the first Volume, though I have the consolation of believing that none but practised eyes will observe them. I am glad you like The Black Veil. I think the title is a good one, because it is uncommon, and does not impair the interest of the story by partially explaining its main feature.?
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Dickens Print: Book
'Saturday 31st July.
?Nicholas Nickleby? - (Charles Dickens)'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gerald Moore Print: Book
'15th March 1929
Miss M?ndel and I inspect my little library. We read some Brooks, Kipling, Holmes, Artemus Ward, de Quincey -- in short, a browse. We looked at ?Phiz? illustrations to ?Sketches by Boz? and she talked of Wilhelm Busch as the greatest of German pencil artists.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gerald Moore Print: Book
'My pal was a typical Cockney recidivist who sold fruit on a coster's barrow between convictions and went crook when sales dwindled to vanishing point... I was attracted to him in the first place by his amazing knowledge of Dickens. He spent every moment of leisure reading Dickens and had, in the course of a dozen or more years in prison, read little else. There was no single scrap of Dickens' work that he hadn't read, not once, or twice, but many times. Mention any character you liked and little B- would give you a verbal picture of him and his setting in the story in which he appeared. More than once at exercise he has walked behind me spouting whole pages dealing with his favourite characters, accompanying his copious quotations with a running commentary on their virtues and failings in a vein so humorous that I have more than once had to fall out to avoid startling the whole exercise by going off into peals of laughter.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book, Serial / periodical
'I am not ashamed to confess that during those weeks of imprisonment I too wept both by day and by night; not loudly or clamorously, but silently and with an intensity of misery that wasted my strength and filled my brain with hideous thoughts. The first library book issued to me was "David Copperfield"; and with the incipient ego-centrism of the budding criminal I imagined I could detect similarities between Dickens's early experiences and my own. For many nights I cried myself to sleep with "David Copperfield" hugged close, as if in him I had found a fellow sufferer.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Stuart Wood [pseud?] Print: Book
'As I began to mend, the Governor, to keep me from brooding too much, gave orders that I was to have all the reading matter I wanted within the limits of the prison library, and my book changed just as often as I liked and at any hour of the day. To a man eager to improve his acquaintance with standard literature such a privilege was immeasurably great, and for the next six weeks or so I browsed among the Victorian novelists - Austin [sic?], the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith, Lytton, Kingsley, Reade, Hughes, Trollope and others.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Stuart Wood [pseud?] Print: Book
'Of Dickens, dear friend, I know nothing. About a year ago, from idle curiosity, I picked up The Old Curiosity Shop, & of all the rotten vulgar un-literary writing. . .! Worse than George Eliot?s. If a novelist can?t write where is the beggar?'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'Nickleby is very good. I stood out against Mr Dickens as long as I could, but he has conquered me'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sydney Smith Print: Serial / periodical
'You have been so used to these sort of impertinences, that I believe you will exuse me for saying how very much I am pleased with the first number of your new work. Pecksniff and his daughters, and Pinch, are admirable, - quite first rate painting, such as no-one but yourself can execute.
I did not like your genealogy of the Chuzzlewits, and I must wait a little to see how Martin turns out; I am impatient for the next number'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sydney Smith Print: Serial / periodical
'I have not even yet made up my mind about Dickens, & I am glad that so far I have never expressed an opinion about him, except playfully, in print. I got fairly stuck in "David Copperfield" & the same in "Pickwick". I am forced to admit that I am out of sympathy with those big Victorians. . . .'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'I have not even yet made up my mind about Dickens, & I am glad that so far I have never expressed an opinion about him, except playfully, in print. I got fairly stuck in "David Copperfield" & the same in "Pickwick". I am forced to admit that I am out of sympathy with those big Victorians. . . .'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'I read aloud several pages of Martin Chuzzlewit & rather flattered myself I gave expression to the author's nicest sentiments. I was extremely pleased with myself & unanimously rewarded my exertions with a glass of gin & water and the Hardest manilla I could find my cigar case, after which I tried on the smoking cap Emma gave me on my birthday, looked in the glass & wondered I was not more distinguished then went to bed.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Book
'Read a little of Dombey & Son which I had lent me last evening by Mr Reed.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Book
'Read for an hour or so & then turned into bed'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Book
'You may be interested to hear that the Miss Jaffrays are reading: having only eyes and not a 'pair of patent double magnifying microscopes' (or whatever it was that dear Sam Weller said) ...
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 2 June 1837:
'I agree with you in thinking Pickwick admirable -- but I have not read every number [...]
what is striking in him is his wonderful individuality -- He never or seldom sacrifices the
natural to the comic -- but wins the jest from Nature without stealing it. No one could pass a
character of his in the street without bowing.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Serial / periodical
'Before leaving the cotton mill I had the good fortune to make my first acquaintance with the earlier works of Charles Dickens. Our manager, who was a reading man, was subscribing to periodically issued numbers of the "Pickwick Papers"... and he generously offered me an early perusal of the "Pickwick Papers", on the condition that I fetched the numbers as they were due from a little stationer's shop near the Navigation Inn. This was a double pleasure to me, as in addition to reading the pamphlet I could have half-an-hour's breathing outside the mill. Dickens assisted in lightening the burden of a weary time. I gathered fresh life from his admirable writings; and even then began to look into the distant future, with the hope that at sometime I might be enabled to track his footsteps, however far I might be behind. This prospect constantly buoyed up my hopes; and, when at last I was taken away from the mill I felt a regret that by this proceeding I sacrificed a glorious opportunity of making myself known in the world.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Benjamin Brierley Print: Serial / periodical
Elizabeth Barrett to James Martin, 6 February 1843:
'Do you know that the royal Boz lives close to us -- three doors from Mr Kenyon in Harley
Place? The new numbers appear to me admirable, & full of life & blood .. whatever we may
say to the thick rouging & extravagance of gesture. There is a beauty, a tenderness, too, in
the organ-scene'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Serial / periodical
Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 27 December 1843:
'The Christmas Carol strikes me much as it does you. I dont like the machinery -- which is
entangled with allegory & ghostery -- but I like & admire the mode of the working out -- & the
exquisite scenes about the clerk & little Tiny [Tim]; I thank the writer in my heart of hearts
for them.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
I' wonder if you ever read Dickens?s [italics] Christmas Books [end italics] ? I don?t know that I would recommend you to read them, because they are too much perhaps. I have only read two of them yet, and I have cried my eyes out, and had a terrible fight not to sob. But O, dear God, they are [italics] good [end italics] − and, I feel so good after them, and would do anything, yet and shall do anything, to make it a little better for people. I want to go out and comfort someone; I shall never listen to the nonsense they tell one, about not giving money −I [italics] shall [end italics] give money; not that I haven?t done so always, but I shall do it with a high hand now. O what a jolly thing it is for a man to have written books like these books, and just [italics] filled [end italics] people?s hearts with pity.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
Mary Russell Mitford to Elizabeth Barrett, 29 December 1844:
'I have read the "Chimes." I don't like it [...] Mr Dickens wants the earnest good-faith in
narration which makes Balzac so enchanting.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Russell Mitford Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 30 December 1844:
'The "Chimes" touched me very much! I thought it & still think it, one of the most beautiful of [Dickens's] works.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Virginia Woolf to Hugh Walpole, 8 February 1936:
'I'm reading David Copperfield for the 6th time with almost complete satisfaction. I'd forgotten
how magnificent it is [...] So enthusiastic am I that I've got a new life of him [Dickens]: which
makes me dislike him as a human being.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'When you have time & spirits for it, pray read "Sketches by Boz" with Cruikshank's designs. Except ones daily Scripture reading, I like no books that do not make me laugh, provided the laugh is not provoked by anything bordering upon indecency. - A little innocent vulgarity or even coarseness, I do not mind, if accompanied by wit & humour. Dickens has edited a delightful Life of poor dear Grimaldi. Have you seen Benson Earl Hill's "Recollections of an Artillery Officer"? I was much amused by it.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Harriet Burney Print: Book
'When you have time & spirits for it, pray read "Sketches by Boz" with Cruikshank's designs. Except ones daily Scripture reading, I like no books that do not make me laugh, provided the laugh is not provoked by anything bordering upon indecency. - A little innocent vulgarity or even coarseness, I do not mind, if accompanied by wit & humour. Dickens has edited a delightful Life of poor dear Grimaldi. Have you seen Benson Earl Hill's "Recollections of an Artillery Officer"? I was much amused by it.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Harriet Burney Print: Book
'Pray do you now and then read modern Biography? I have been highly entertained, & even interested by the Memoirs of Mathews, edited & mostly written by his wife. Well, and another lively amusing book of the same class is the Life of Grimaldi, by Dickens. Both Mathews & Grimaldi, though considered as Buffoons, were full of good feeling, & excellent private characters. I arose from the perusal of each work, with respect & love for both men; and since the publication of Crabb's Memoirs, and Campbell's Life of Mrs Siddons, I have read no Biography I like half so well'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Harriet Burney Print: Book
Sunday 17 May 1925: 'Yesterday we had tea with Margaret in her new house [...] She is severe to Lilian [Harris, her companion], who [...] is not allowed to plant flowers, she said bitterly, because it worries Margaret, & so nothing is done to the garden, which too worries Margaret. For these worries, she takes Ethel M. Dell & Dickens.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Caroline Llewelyn Davies Print: Book
'I breakfasted luxuriously in my tent off porridge, fried ham and tea and afterwards read "Pickwick Papers", pausing now and then to anoint myself with face cream.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Frank Smythe Print: Book
'I sat up late reading of Mr. Jingle's artifices, until at last I began to speculate drowsily as to that gentleman's proficiency on ski. It seemed that he was arguing fiercely with Mr.Snodgrass on the advantages`of the stem Christiania over the telemark, and I caught fragments such as, "Magnificent feeling-always use it-sharp swing-no bone breaker-good turn-very!" While Mr. Pickwick, clad in gaiters,smiled benignantly in the background.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Frank Smythe Print: Book
'Our library too was a weighty affair. Shipton had the longest novel that had been published in recent years, Warren a 2,000-page work on physiology.[...] On Good Friday [...] the rest of us lay about, played chess or read the less technical portion of our curiously assorted library. This included "Gone with the Wind" (Shipton) "Seventeenth Century Verse" (Oliver), "Montaigne's Essays" (Warren), "Don Quixote" (self), "Adam Bede" (Lloyd), "Martin Chuzzlewit" (Smythe), "Stones of Venice" (Odell) and a few others. Warren, who rejoined us that day, besides his weighty tome on Physiology -in which there were several funny anecdotes if one took the trouble to look - had with him a yet weightier volume on the singularly inappropriate subject of Tropical Diseases. '
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Frank Smythe Print: Book
Tuesday 25 February 1936: 'I've had headaches. Vanquish them by lying still & binding books & reading D. Copperfield.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'Her reading as a child was voracious, although her late start in learning to read for herself left her with a cosy taste for being read to. Her governess hads read aloud to her the story of Perseus and "Jungle Jinks" and most things in between. Once she read for herself, she had a passion for George Macdonald: his Curdie was one of her heroes. She loved Baroness Orczy's "Scarlet Pimpernel", and E. Nesbit's books. She read Dickens exhaustively as a child and, as a result, could not read him as a young adult: "There is no more oxygen left, for me, anywhere in the atmosphere of his writings".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Bowen Print: Book
Tuesday 11 April 1939: 'I am reading Dickens; by way of a refresher. how he lives; not writes: both a virtue & a fault. Like seeing something emerge; without containing mind. Yet the accuracy & even sometimes the penetration [...] Also I'm reading Rochefoucauld.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Thursday 13 April 1939: 'I read about 100 pages of Dickens yesterday, & see something vague about the drama & fiction: how the emphasis, the caricature of these innumerable scenes, forever formng character, descend from the stage.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'I think I have behaved most abominably in never taking any notice of your great kindness in sending me David Copperfield, and your note. Oh, dear! I have been so whirled about {against} since I saw you last that I hardly know what to write. I do so like D. Copperfield; and it was a charming liberty you took in sending it.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Serial / periodical
'in the 'bus I sate next to somebody, whose face I thought I knew, & then I made out it was only that he was very like Mr Hensleigh Wedgwood; however he read 'Little-Dorrit' & I read it over his shoulder. Oh Polly! he was such a slow reader, you'll sympathise, Meta won't, my impatience at his never getting to the bottom of the page so we only got to the end of the page. We only read the first two chapters, so I never found out who 'Little Dorrit' is [Gaskell then summarises what happens in these chapters] By this time we got to Knutsford, & my friend got out, & now that I saw him no longer in profile but full-faced I recognized Mr Seymour, & was sorry I had not moved'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Serial / periodical
Wednesday 25 October 1939: 'As a journalist I'm in demand [...] To relax I read Little Dorrit [...] Gerald Heard's book spun me to distraction last night. So good & suggestive & firm for 200 pages: then a mere bleat bitter repetition contorsion [sic] & inversion [...] he's nothing to offer, once he's done his historical accounting.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'in the 'bus I sate next to somebody, whose face I thought I knew, & then I made out it was only that he was very like Mr Hensleigh Wedgwood; however he read 'Little-Dorrit' & I read it over his shoulder. Oh Polly! he was such a slow reader, you'll sympathise, Meta won't, my impatience at his never getting to the bottom of the page so we only got to the end of the page. We only read the first two chapters, so I never found out who 'Little Dorrit' is [Gaskell then summarises what happens in these chapters] By this time we got to Knutsford, & my friend got out, & now that I saw him no longer in profile but full-faced I recognized Mr Seymour, & was sorry I had not moved'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Mr Seymour Print: Serial / periodical
'The weather is damnable, especially when one has neither car nor taxi. I read ¼ of "Nicholas Nickleby" yesterday because I had no brain left. It wasn’t so bad in its crude, posterish way. Anyhow, it could be read.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'In last week's No of All the Year Round is a repudiation (by Mr Dickens,) of having intended Leigh Hunt by Harrold Skimpole'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Serial / periodical
Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Louisa Boyle, 5 December 1850:
'We live just as quietly as we used to do [...] One drawback is not being able to get new books till they are old -- in spite of which, we have just read "In Memoriam" -- how beautiful! -- how full of pathos, and subtle feeling & thought! [...] Then we have Carlyle's Latter day pamphlets .. powerful & characteristic -- and seventeen numbers of David Copperfield, which we both set down or rather set up as Dickens's masterpiece.'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Print: Serial / periodical
Leonard Woolf to Saxon Sydney-Turner, 27 August 1906:
'I am camping out in a tent in the wilderness. I told you I believe I was coming for a month as A[ssistant]G[overnment]A[gent] Mannar. I am now on circuit which means that I ride about 10 miles each day through a desolation of sand to visit a few huts which are called villages [...] I ride through the sand from 6 A.M. to 9 & lie in my tent during the heat of the day & read Dickens whom of course I now consider the greatest of novelists. At any rate he is astonishingly amusing in Kaddukkarankudiyiruppu (which means the village of the man of the Jungle).'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
'My mother started to read to me when I was very young indeed. She read aloud beautifully and never got tired, and she would never, from the first, read anything that she could not enjoy herself, which cut out all the poor quality writing which every right-minded child loves when he can get it. Her only concession was one weekly comic, "Rainbow". But apart from that, I was reared on a fine mixed diet of Beatrix Potter, A.A. Milne, Dickens, Stevenson, Hans Andersen, Kenneth Grahame and Kipling – especially Puck of Pook’s Hill whose three magnificent stories of Roman Britain were the beginning of my own passion for the subject, and resulted in the fullness of time in The Eagle of the Ninth. Hero myths of Greece and Rome I had, in an unexpurgated edition which my mother edited herself as she went along, and Norse and Saxon and Celtic legends. There were Whyte Melville’s The Gladiators and Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii and Weigal’s Egyptian Princess; for my mother loved historical novels – history of any kind, though her view of it was always the minstrel’s rather than the historian’s.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Rosemary Sutcliff Print: Book
'Father was well read in politics and in the nineteenth century novelists, Dickens and Trollope being his favourites. But his reading nourished the sour scepticism that possesed him [and he suggested to Glasser that reading was a waste of time]'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mr Glasser Print: Book
'Great Expectations. Alliance between atmosphere and plot (the convicts) make it more solid and satisfactory than anything else of D[ickens]. known to me. Very fine writing occasionally ([italics]end of Pt.I[end italics].) [...] Occasional hints not developed -- e.g. [...] Jagger's [sic] character [italics]does[end italics] nothing, Herbert Pocket's has to be revised. But all the defects are trivial, and the course of events is both natural and exciting [goes on to comment further, and to quote at length from conclusion to 'the first stage of Pip's Expectations']'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster Print: Book
'At home there were daily Bible-readings in the family circle for many years, but secular reading aloud happily also found a place. Lucy was "A good reader" and gave them Scott and Thackeray and Tom Moore as well as Shakespeare; Edward read Pickwick.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Housman Print: Book
'My mother did her conscientious best to remedy the deficiencies of our literary education by reading Dickens aloud to us on Sunday afternoons. We ploughed through "David Copperfield" and "Nicholas Nickleby" in this manner, which perhaps explains why I have never been able to finish anything else by Dickens except "A Tale of Two Cities".
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
'His books, over three hundred of which are preserved as he left them in 1918, show the range - and limitations - of his interests at school and later. Shakespeare, Scott, Keats and Dickens predominate, but he also worked on Milton, several eighteenth-century authors, and some Elizabethan and late Medieval poets. About two thirds of his library can be classified as "English literature", including biographies of at least twenty authors [explanatory sentence about dominance of biography not criticism in those days]. There are also nearly fifty books in or about French, a high proportion for someone of Owen's respectable but ordinary educational background. the rest are mostly botany, history and classics. The imprints are often those of the popular "libraries" of the time - Everyman's Library, the People's Books, the Home University Library, Penny Poets - cheap editions aimed at the growing market of young people like himself who were keen on self-improvement'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Wilfred Owen Print: Book
Read for the fist time June 1865. Macaulay took this volume more than once on our Easter trips.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Otto Trevelyan Print: Book
'It was at this time, too, in the 'silent' reading periods at school, that - conventionally enough, I suppose, for a bookish child - I came upon Stevenson's "Treasure Island", "Don Quixote", "David Copperfield", all in abridged versions'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Causley Print: Book
'Read nearly the whole of the day. Had four numbers of "Edwin Drood" & read them all, then in the evening went to the Yorick & read the fifth number ... I read the Australasian'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Serial / periodical
'Read nearly the whole of the day. Had four numbers of "Edwin Drood" & read them all, then in the evening went to the Yorick & read the fifth number ... I read the Australasian'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Serial / periodical
'Went to the Yorick in the evening & stayed there for some time reading the last number of Edwin Drood & some English Papers.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Serial / periodical
'There was a little rain before I got back to the Gaol, then I had dinner & read the Pickwick Papers till about nine o'clock'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Book
John Wilson Croker to Mr C. Phillips, 3 January 1854:
'As to my novel reading I confess that in my younger days I used to read them all from Charlotte Smith to Maria Edgeworth; Scott I have by heart; but I so far differ from you about Hook's that I date my later indifference to novels from my disappointment at his.
'"Gilbert Gurney" is something of an autobiography, as you say [...] the book might have been called a picture, for which our society furnished the principal sitters; yet I could not read it. I diligently tried to do so, but never accomplished a volume, and I have often debated in my own mind how I, who looked with admiration and wonder at Hook's power of oral amusement, should be so repelled by his novels [...] it led me at first to read no novel, that I might have a better excuse to my poor dear Hook for not reading his; and insensibly I lost the taste for them altogether, partly from mu mind's growing less impressionable, but partly, or perhaps chiefly, from a very matter-of-fact cause, that I happened never to have subscribed to a circulating library, and since I left office I have had, I know not how, less spare time than I had at the Admiralty in the height of the war. I was greatly struck with some early detached tales of Mr. Dickens, and some stray livraisons of his longer works, but I found I could not read them continuously'.'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Wilson Croker Print: Unknown
John Wilson Croker to Mr C. Phillips, 3 January 1854:
'As to my novel reading I confess that in my younger days I used to read them all from Charlotte Smith to Maria Edgeworth; Scott I have by heart; but I so far differ from you about Hook's that I date my later indifference to novels from my disappointment at his.
'"Gilbert Gurney" is something of an autobiography, as you say [...] the book might have been called a picture, for which our society furnished the principal sitters; yet I could not read it. I diligently tried to do so, but never accomplished a volume, and I have often debated in my own mind how I, who looked with admiration and wonder at Hook's power of oral amusement, should be so repelled by his novels [...] it led me at first to read no novel, that I might have a better excuse to my poor dear Hook for not reading his; and insensibly I lost the taste for them altogether, partly from mu mind's growing less impressionable, but partly, or perhaps chiefly, from a very matter-of-fact cause, that I happened never to have subscribed to a circulating library, and since I left office I have had, I know not how, less spare time than I had at the Admiralty in the height of the war. I was greatly struck with some early detached tales of Mr. Dickens, and some stray livraisons of his longer works, but I found I could not read them continuously'.'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Wilson Croker Print: Unknown
Books read by Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol, July 1896-December 1896, taken from his list of books requested and then sent by his friends. Source text author notes that Wilde read and re-read everything available to him in prison. 'Greek Testament, Milman's History of the Jews; Farrar's St Paul, Tennyson's Poems (complete in one volume), Percy's Reliques (the collection of old ballads), Christopher Marlowe's Works, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Life of Frederick the Great, A prose translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, Keats's Poems, Chaucer's Poems, Spenser's Poems, Renan's Vie de Jesus and The Apostles, Ranke's History of the Popes, Critical and Historical Essays by Cardinal Newman, Emerson's Essays (If possible in one volume), Cheap edition of Dickens's Works.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde Print: Book
'Read "Bleak House" in evening'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'Take Mr Lillyvick's "I don't think nothink at all of that langwidge" as an example of people's having "a right to their opinion".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'Read end of Charles Dickens' "American Readings, &c; dreadful beyond words.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'read a Dickens ghost story (the old nurse's) and so early to bed.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'A horribly faint despairing evening, giving up the ghost of myself in bed, and complicated by reading the horrible death of Mrs Skewton in Dickens' abominable "Dombey".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'His peers were surprised to hear him speak disparagingly of Dickens, the most popular novelist of the day. While Wilde admired the author's humour and his gift for caricature he loathed Dickens's moralising.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde Print: Book
'Since the age of five I have been a great reader [...]. At ten years of age I had read much of Victor Hugo and other romantics. I had read in Polish and in French, history, voyages, novels; I knew "Gil Blas" and "Don Quixote" in abridged editions; I had read in early boyhood Polish poets and some French poets, but I cannot say what I read on the evening [in September 1889] before I began to write myself. I belive it was a novel, and it is quite possible that it was one of Anthony Trollope's novels.It is very likely.My acquaintance with him was then very recent. He is one of the English novelists whose works I read for the first time in English. With men of European reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was otherwise. My first introduction to English imaginative literature was "Nicholas Nickleby". It was extraordinary how well Mrs. Nickleby could chatter disconnectedly in Polish [...] It was, I have no doubt an excellent translation. This must have been in the year 1870.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
18 July 1876:
'Left Paris by tidal service at half-past nine, reaching London before seven... I am reading again, with great delight, Thackeray's Esmond. Since I left England [on ceramics-collecting expedition] I have read Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, Smollett's Peregrine Pickle and Mrs Elliot's Old Court Life in France, various in style, all in their way of much interest to me.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Schreiber Print: Book
'As Charles Schreiber's condition appeared to grow worse instead of better [following voyage to South Africa recommended by doctors, and stay at Wynberg] a move to Ceres was recommended, and just before Christmas they settled there [...] Lady Charlotte read to him a great deal as they sat out in front of the house. The books she chose included the Pickwick Papers, Stanley's Jewish Church, Green's History of England and Junius' Letters.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Schreiber Print: Book
16 March 1884, from Lisbon, en route home from South Africa:
'I am now reading to C. S. that charming book Rob Roy. Scott never palls. In the steamer we
amused ourselves with Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop [...] C.S. likes my reading,
and it has the blessed effect of often sending him to sleep, when he seems indisposed and
restless.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Schreiber Print: Book
16 March 1884, from Lisbon, en route home from South Africa:
'I am now reading to C. S. that charming book Rob Roy. Scott never palls. In the steamer we
amused ourselves with Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop [...] C.S. likes my reading,
and it has the blessed effect of often sending him to sleep, when he seems indisposed and
restless.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Schreiber Print: Book
'We have been extremely interested & amused, I think there is more power in the story, & perhaps more vigor in the characters than in any of the others, rather an increased tendency to exaggeration & a minute length of description'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: G. W. F. Howard, Lord Morpeth Print: Unknown
'I have however, read Edwin Drood, and finished the hateful Cousin Pons.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: James Lees-Milne Print: Book
'I have also read — for the first time — Hard Times.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
Charlotte Bronte to her publisher, W. S. Williams, 13 September 1849:
'Reading has, of late, been my great solace and recreation [in year following the deaths of her brother and two sisters] [...] I have read "David Copperfield"; it seems to me very good &mdash: admirable in some parts. You said it had affinity to "Jane Eyre." It has, now and then &mdash: only what an advantage has Dickens in his varied knowledge of men and things!'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charlotte Brontë Print: Serial / periodical
Mary Taylor to her schoolfriend Ellen Nussey, 11 March 1851:
'How we work! and lift, and carry, and knock boxes open as if we were carpenters by trade;
and sit down in the midst of the mess when we are quite tired [...] and find it is the middle of
the afternoon and we've forgotten our dinner! And then we settle to have some tea and eggs,
and go on reading letters all the time we're eating, and don't give over working till bedtime,
and take a new number of "David Copperfield" to bed with us and drop asleep at the second
page.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Taylor Print: Serial / periodical
Charlotte Bronte to George Smith, 11 March 1852:
'Is the first number of "Bleak House" generally admired? I liked the Chancery part, but when it
passes into the autobiographic form, and the young woman who announces that she is not
"bright" begins her history, it seems to me too often weak and twaddling; an amiable nature is
caricatured, not faithfully rendered, in Miss Esther Summerson.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Charlotte Brontë Print: Serial / periodical
'We find ''Pickwick'' not at all too low for our taste, and it reads aloud much better than to oneself.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Wedgewood and Wedgewood/Allen family Print: Serial / periodical
'A Meeting held at Grove House May 3rd H. B. Lawson in the chair
Min 1. Minutes of last Read and approved
[...]
[Min] 4 The Subject of the evening "Humour" was then introduced by H. B. Lawson who fascinated us by his thoughtful attempts to
define his subject[.] An interesting discussion followed in which the disputants backed their opinions by literary allusion and we
were led to wonder if Humour flowed from F E Pollards heart & wit from R H Robsons head.
After Supper the Club settled down to enjoy the following selections chosen to represent English Humour in literature down the
Ages[:]
Prologue of Chaucers Canterbury Tales The Prioress & Wife of Bath read by Howard R. Smith
Shakespeares Henry IV The Men in Buckram read by R. H Robson Fallstaff
[ditto] S. A. Reynolds Poins
[ditto] C. E. Stansfield Prince Hall [sic]
[ditto] Geo Burrow Gadshill
Jane Austin Pride & Prejudice Mr. Collins proposes
[ditto] Mrs Robson
Charles Dickens David Copperfield Mrs Micawber on her husbands career[?] Geo Burrow
Charles Lamb A Letter Alfred Rawlings
Lewis Carrols Alice in Wonderland The Lobster Quadrill Mary Reynolds
Jerome K. Jerome Three Men in a Boat Uncle Podger hangs a picture F. E. Pollard
Hilaire Belloc Cautionary Tales "George" recited by Howard R. Smith'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: George Burrow Print: Book
'... your remarks on Great Expectations are very good. We have both re-read it this winter .. The object being a play ...'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
'She [Emma Darwin] was especially devoted to Jane Austen's novels and almost knew them by heart... Scott was also a perennial favourite, especially ''The Antiquary''. Mrs Gaskell's novels she read over and over again; Dickens and Thackeray she cared for less.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Darwin Print: Book
'Meeting held at Grove House. 16th October 1944
J. Knox Taylor in the chair.
[...]
2. The minutes of the last meeting were read & signed.
[...]
5. The subject of the evening was Charles Dickens and we were once again indebted to Howard Smith for a biography. In a
skilfully condensed account of the chief events of his life, we heard of the hardships Dickens underwent in childhood, of his
sudden & quite early achievement of success & financial ease. His marriage, his many children & the unhappy atmosphere
of his home life in later years. His visits to America and his sudden death at the age of 58.
6. Muriel Stevens read from David Copperfield the account of his arrival at the house of his Aunt Betsey Trotwood.
Humphrey Hare gave us the benefit of his local knowledge and described Peggotty’s Cottage at Great Yarmouth as seen by
his Father, and also Blundestone Rookery as it is today.
7. F. E. Pollard told us something of Chestertons book on Dickens and read a number of extracts showing his appreciation
of a number some of the lesser characters. Among these were Mrs. Nickleby, Mantalini, Dick Swiveller, Mr.
Stiggins, the Rev. Septimus Crisparkle and Toots.
8. We heard with interest that a recent census of boys’ reading at Leighton Park revealed Dickens even now as the third
most popular author.
9. Arnold Joselin read from Martin Chuzzlewit the chapter where Mrs. Gamp instals herself as night-nurse.
10. Knox Taylor read from The Pickwick Papers the account of the visit to Eatanswill parliamentary election.
[signed as a true record by] Arnold G. Joselin 21 Nov. 1944'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Muriel Stevens Print: Book
'Meeting held at Grove House. 16th October 1944
J. Knox Taylor in the chair.
[...]
2. The minutes of the last meeting were read & signed.
[...]
5. The subject of the evening was Charles Dickens and we were once again indebted to Howard Smith for a biography. In a
skilfully condensed account of the chief events of his life, we heard of the hardships Dickens underwent in childhood, of his
sudden & quite early achievement of success & financial ease. His marriage, his many children & the unhappy atmosphere
of his home life in later years. His visits to America and his sudden death at the age of 58.
6. Muriel Stevens read from David Copperfield the account of his arrival at the house of his Aunt Betsey Trotwood.
Humphrey Hare gave us the benefit of his local knowledge and described Peggotty’s Cottage at Great Yarmouth as seen by
his Father, and also Blundestone Rookery as it is today.
7. F. E. Pollard told us something of Chestertons book on Dickens and read a number of extracts showing his appreciation
of a number some of the lesser characters. Among these were Mrs. Nickleby, Mantalini, Dick Swiveller, Mr.
Stiggins, the Rev. Septimus Crisparkle and Toots.
8. We heard with interest that a recent census of boys’ reading at Leighton Park revealed Dickens even now as the third
most popular author.
9. Arnold Joselin read from Martin Chuzzlewit the chapter where Mrs. Gamp instals herself as night-nurse.
10. Knox Taylor read from The Pickwick Papers the account of the visit to Eatanswill parliamentary election.
[signed as a true record by] Arnold G. Joselin 21 Nov. 1944'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: [boys at Leighton Park School] Print: Book
'Meeting held at Grove House. 16th October 1944
J. Knox Taylor in the chair.
[...]
2. The minutes of the last meeting were read & signed.
[...]
5. The subject of the evening was Charles Dickens and we were once again indebted to Howard Smith for a biography. In a
skilfully condensed account of the chief events of his life, we heard of the hardships Dickens underwent in childhood, of his
sudden & quite early achievement of success & financial ease. His marriage, his many children & the unhappy atmosphere
of his home life in later years. His visits to America and his sudden death at the age of 58.
6. Muriel Stevens read from David Copperfield the account of his arrival at the house of his Aunt Betsey Trotwood.
Humphrey Hare gave us the benefit of his local knowledge and described Peggotty’s Cottage at Great Yarmouth as seen by
his Father, and also Blundestone Rookery as it is today.
7. F. E. Pollard told us something of Chestertons book on Dickens and read a number of extracts showing his appreciation
of a number some of the lesser characters. Among these were Mrs. Nickleby, Mantalini, Dick Swiveller, Mr.
Stiggins, the Rev. Septimus Crisparkle and Toots.
8. We heard with interest that a recent census of boys’ reading at Leighton Park revealed Dickens even now as the third
most popular author.
9. Arnold Joselin read from Martin Chuzzlewit the chapter where Mrs. Gamp instals herself as night-nurse.
10. Knox Taylor read from The Pickwick Papers the account of the visit to Eatanswill parliamentary election.
[signed as a true record by] Arnold G. Joselin 21 Nov. 1944'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Joselin Print: Book
'Meeting held at Grove House. 16th October 1944
J. Knox Taylor in the chair.
[...]
2. The minutes of the last meeting were read & signed.
[...]
5. The subject of the evening was Charles Dickens and we were once again indebted to Howard Smith for a biography. In a
skilfully condensed account of the chief events of his life, we heard of the hardships Dickens underwent in childhood, of his
sudden & quite early achievement of success & financial ease. His marriage, his many children & the unhappy atmosphere
of his home life in later years. His visits to America and his sudden death at the age of 58.
6. Muriel Stevens read from David Copperfield the account of his arrival at the house of his Aunt Betsey Trotwood.
Humphrey Hare gave us the benefit of his local knowledge and described Peggotty’s Cottage at Great Yarmouth as seen by
his Father, and also Blundestone Rookery as it is today.
7. F. E. Pollard told us something of Chestertons book on Dickens and read a number of extracts showing his appreciation
of a number some of the lesser characters. Among these were Mrs. Nickleby, Mantalini, Dick Swiveller, Mr.
Stiggins, the Rev. Septimus Crisparkle and Toots.
8. We heard with interest that a recent census of boys’ reading at Leighton Park revealed Dickens even now as the third
most popular author.
9. Arnold Joselin read from Martin Chuzzlewit the chapter where Mrs. Gamp instals herself as night-nurse.
10. Knox Taylor read from The Pickwick Papers the account of the visit to Eatanswill parliamentary election.
[signed as a true record by] Arnold G. Joselin 21 Nov. 1944'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Knox Taylor Print: Book
'Here I enjoyed a number of days in reading A Tale of Two Cities, and in sending off contributions to the Balkan News, which was a racy little news sheet published by the military authorities.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vero Walter Garratt Print: Book
'Meeting held at 39, Eastern Avenue, 10.2.41
A. B. Dilks in the chair
1. The minutes of the last meeting were read and signed.
[...]
4. The subject for this evening was “Winter – in Poetry & Prose”. [...]
The programme was as follows:
Dickens – extract from “A Christmas Carol”
read by R. D. L. Moore
Hardy – “The Mellstock Carols” from ‘Under the Greeenwood Tree’
read by Mrs. H. R. Smith
Shakespeare – “Blow, blow thou winter wind”
sung by F. E. Pollard
V. Sackville West – extract from a poem “The Land”
read by Margaret Dilks
H. M. Wallis – Account of the Blizzard of 1881
read by Howard Smith
Dickens – The Pickwick Club on the Ice
read by A. B. Dilks
Mendelssohn – The Hebrides overture
played by Beecham & the L.P.O. (on gramophone records)'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Roger Moore Print: Book
'Meeting held at 39, Eastern Avenue, 10.2.41
A. B. Dilks in the chair
1. The minutes of the last meeting were read and signed.
[...]
4. The subject for this evening was “Winter – in Poetry & Prose”. [...]
The programme was as follows:
Dickens – extract from “A Christmas Carol”
read by R. D. L. Moore
Hardy – “The Mellstock Carols” from ‘Under the Greeenwood Tree’
read by Mrs. H. R. [Edith] Smith
Shakespeare – “Blow, blow thou winter wind”
sung by F. E. Pollard
V. Sackville West – extract from a poem “The Land”
read by Margaret Dilks
H. M. Wallis – Account of the Blizzard of 1881
read by Howard Smith
Dickens – The Pickwick Club on the Ice
read by A. B. Dilks
Mendelssohn – The Hebrides overture
played by Beecham & the L.P.O. (on gramophone records)'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Bruce Dilks Print: Book
'Meeting held at 39, Eastern Avenue. 20. 8. 40
A. B. Dilks in the chair.
1. The minutes of the last meeting were read and approved.
2. The Treasurer presented his Report. This differed somewhat from the Report
made by the retiring Treasurer at our last meeting, & either for this reason, or
perhaps because she was told she had not yet paid her Subscription, Janet
Rawlings proposed that in future a receipt should be given by the Treasurer for all
money paid to him. The proposal was seconded by Edith Smith & passed
unanimously by the meeting.
3. A letter was read from Ethel Stevens regretting that owing to the present
difficulty of attending meetings, she must resign from the club. The Secretary was
instructed to write to her, regretfully accepting her resignation.
[...]
6. Mary S. W. Pollard started the Literary General Knowledge Test by questioning
us in poetry and the poets. Questions which we found singularly difficult to
answer.
7. Margaret Dilks proceeded to test our knowledge of prose by reading three short
character sketches from novels. Most people had no difficulty in identifying these
as Mr. Pickwick, Mr. & Mrs. Bennett and Soames Forsyte.
8. After coffee we were faced with the Herculean task of answering a General
Knowledge paper consisting of 9 sections, each of about 10 questions. This paper
was set by Howard Smith and A. B. Dilkes and we are very grateful to them for
the time & trouble they took in compiling it. [...] “Time” was called at 10 o’clock
and the chairman then read out the answers. The integrity of the Club was not
questioned so we each corrected our own papers. [It was a matter for regret that
the two sections calling for original composition should have been left out by so
many members ...]
[signed by] Howard R. Smith
13/9/1940'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Dilks Print: Book
'Meeting held at 39, Eastern Avenue. 20. 8. 40
A. B. Dilks in the chair.
1. The minutes of the last meeting were read and approved.
2. The Treasurer presented his Report. This differed somewhat from the Report
made by the retiring Treasurer at our last meeting, & either for this reason, or
perhaps because she was told she had not yet paid her Subscription, Janet
Rawlings proposed that in future a receipt should be given by the Treasurer for all
money paid to him. The proposal was seconded by Edith Smith & passed
unanimously by the meeting.
3. A letter was read from Ethel Stevens regretting that owing to the present
difficulty of attending meetings, she must resign from the club. The Secretary was
instructed to write to her, regretfully accepting her resignation.
[...]
6. Mary S. W. Pollard started the Literary General Knowledge Test by questioning
us in poetry and the poets. Questions which we found singularly difficult to
answer.
7. Margaret Dilks proceeded to test our knowledge of prose by reading three short
character sketches from novels. Most people had no difficulty in identifying these
as Mr. Pickwick, Mr. & Mrs. Bennett and Soames Forsyte.
8. After coffee we were faced with the Herculean task of answering a General
Knowledge paper consisting of 9 sections, each of about 10 questions. This paper
was set by Howard Smith and A. B. Dilkes and we are very grateful to them for
the time & trouble they took in compiling it. [...] “Time” was called at 10 o’clock
and the chairman then read out the answers. The integrity of the Club was not
questioned so we each corrected our own papers. [it was a matter for regret that
the two sections calling for original composition should have been left out by so
many members. [...]
[signed by] Howard R. Smith
13/9/1940'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Dilks Print: Book
'I started to read "Bleak House" by Dickens when I was at the base and I should like to get on with it. You might get a small 1/- edition and send it on it will you as I have a bit of time when not in the trenches ... Don't forget to send the Daily Post occasionally so I can see what's happening in B'ham.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Bernard Wilfrid Long Print: Book
'Monday. Morn. did little German. Aft. Read 5 ch. Matthew. 5 pm bath. 7-8 whist -2. Bought a bag 8½ Expected to leave Paderborn. Read a Tale of Two Cities (Dick)'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William Thomas Print: Book
'Sun. Rather depressed. No go. Reading Pickwick Papers &c.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William Thomas Print: Book
'As Father and Betty were talking so much about it, I am reading "Martin Chuzzlewit"
again.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emily Lytton Print: Book
‘I shall be glad to be out of the army. The best thing for me is brainwork again
of some kind. I need something to fix my wandering thought in the morning …
But must have work and movement not to be badly depressed … "Martin
Chuzzlewit" entrances me just now, and I have just come across a delightful
R.A.M.C. man who met Tolstoi in Russia.’
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ivor Bertie Gurney Print: Book
'Read "A Christmas Carol" to the Babs, and Evie
finished it to him.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Verena Pennefather Print: Book
'Read "A Tale of Two Cities" to the Babs after tea.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Verena Pennefather Print: Book
'Finished reading "A Tale of Two Cities" to Babs
after tea & washed my hair.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Verena Pennefather Print: Book
'A more poignant Newcastle memory came later. Settled in the
town in a house of our own, we had been reading David Copperfield
aloud of an evening to manma, when she told us one day that
Dickens was dead.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Ernest Rhys
'Since leaving Oxford I have had quite a little
opportunity for reading and have read all kinds of
things, some of the better books being: Conan
Doyle's "Micah Clarke" and part of "Martin
Chuzzlewit", one or two of Alexander Dumas' tales,
two humorous books by George Birmingham about small
Irish villages, and one or two of Bernard Shaw's
plays. I am still doing dual control on B.E. 2b
machines which are quite out of date for military
purpose and were obsolete even before the war ...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Roderick Ward Maclennan Print: Book
'There is nothing fresh for me to write about. Am
still in the same place and doing little work. A
good deal of my time is spent reading, and at
present my book is:- "Barnaby Rudge" by Dickens.
There is nothing much here to occupy the time.
Most of the fellows are playing cards all the
time, and I don't care much for their games.
Yesterday I was out on the grass reading, but
today it is not so safe ... There is a tiny kitten
knocking around here, and it is very playful.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Wainwright Print: Book
'As a reader he [the Hudson children's tutor, a Mr
Trigg] certainly was great, and every evening, when
the evenings were long, he would give a two hours’
reading to the household. Dickens was then the
most popular writer in the world, and he usually
read Dickens, to the delight of his listeners.
Here he could display his histrionic qualities to
the full. He impersonated every character in the
book, endowing him with voice, gestures,manner,
and expression that fitted him perfectly. It was
more like a play than a reading.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Henry Hudson Print: Book
Fortunately books are fairly plentiful and I keep
my own books (“Dombey & Son” and “Three
Musketeers”) for the time when I am in a place
which nobody has left any books. I have just got
through J.M. Barrie’s “Sentimental Tommie”, and I
am now dipping into “Sketches by Boz”. So the
literature is up to a fairly high standard.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Morris Print: Book
I have just started my “Dombey & Son” having at
last reached a place where books are not very
plentiful. But it is not long enough to last for
many a day.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Morris Print: Book
In the evenings before patience time M. works
while I read “Sketches from Boz” to her. Quite a
Darby & Joan affair.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Morris Print: Book
In the evenings before patience time M. works
while I read “Sketches from Boz” to her. Quite a
Darby & Joan affair.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Margery Morris Print: Book
'May,June' [ditto marks under the words '-July with
Winnie and Edith'].
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Good Print: Book
'Martin Chuzzlewit'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Good Print: Book
'C. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Good Print: Book
