EXTENT TO WHICH DICKENS' NOVELS HAVE BEEN BEAD.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XV, Issue 83, 7 April 1880, Page 4

EXTENT TO WHICH DICKENS' NOVELS HAVE BEEN BEAD.

In widespread popularity the novels of Charles Dickens . have,. I believe, exceeded those of any other British novelist, though they have not yet reached that open market of unrestricted competition which a book reaches only when its copyright has run out. Up to .this present time over 800,000 copies of Pickwick have been sold in this country, and the book is still copyright property. Among the millions of those into whose hands these hundreds of thousands of volumes have fallen, there, can be hardly one who has not received some lesson from what be has read. It may be that many dissent from the mode of. telling .which Dickens adopted in his stories, that they are indifferent to tfce stories tbemselveß, that they question the taste and fail to interest themselves in. the melo-drama-^ tie incidents and unnatural characters,•which it was his delight to pourtraj|| All that has no beating on the iast W which we cow attempt to xjsM M The teaching of which we ar^^^^l ing is not instruction as J^B^^^^ as Dickens taughtji|«9HHEP^n the wisdom of established for its guid■Bflßpr^ill they unconsciously learn ■9pm the author's pages to recognise P^ne fact that happiness is to be obtained "%■ obeying, and not by running coun- " ter to the principals of morality ! Let memory run back for a few moments over these stories, and it will fail to find an immodest girl who has been made alluring to female readers, or an illconditioned youth whose career a lad would ba tempted to envy. No ridicule is thrown on marriage constancy ; no charm is added to idleness, no alluring color is lent to debauchery. — Nineteenth Century.