Magazine Notice

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Magazine Notice.

Blackwood’s Magazine,¹ for April, contains several very interesting articles. Among them is a “Remonstrance with Dickens,” in which Maga takes the great novelist to task for the degeneracy so evident in his later works from the high standard of his earlier novels. The reviewer awards the palm of merit, among Boz’s works, to the Pickwick Papers. He thinks the degeneracy of the author was first apparent in Martin Chuzzlewit, and faults and blemishes continued to increase in Dickens’s subsequent works, until they have altogether dimmed and obscured the rare humor and pathos evinced in Pickwick and the Old Curiosity Shop, and finally, in Little Dorrit,² have so widely spread over that work, “that it is only here and there that a scrap of the author’s native genius peeps almost doubtfully through the lavish upper-growth of affectation.” These weeds have now “made head to such an alarming extent, that we can’t wait for the end of the wilderness of Little Dorrit before recording our earnest protest and deep lament, for in that wilderness we sit down and weep when we remember thee, O Pickwick.”

This is not the first time that a similar complaint has been made against Dickens’s later works, and for our own part we admit its justice, and hope that once most humorous of authors will take the rebuke in good part, and follow the friendly advice of his reviewer, who recommends him to “lay aside his pen for awhile, collecting fitting materials in his own fields, without wandering into regions strange to him, and, when fully ripe, expressing the results of his marvelous faculty of observation in his old natural, humorous, graphic, pathetic way.” The impression which we have felt in reading Dickens’s later works has been that made by John Wesley’s sermon on Dr. Johnson. Being asked what he thought of the sermon, the lexicographer replied, “It was not a good sermon, Sir, but it was one which none but a good preacher could have made.” So say we of Dombey & Son, Bleak House, and especially the 1st volume of Little Dorrit. Taken as a whole, neither of them is a good novel, but there is enough of excellence in each, and especially in the former works, to show that none but a good writer would have written it.

The American edition of Blackwood is published by Messre Leonard Scott & Co., 79 Fulton street, New York, at $8 a year, or with the four English reviews at $10 a year.

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