The Literary Critic

The standing of literary criticism is not high; and yet, there are some, though very few, literary critics who have not only made their own reputations, but have substantially influenced or even established the reputations of great writers at the level which they have occupied ever since. Thus, though Dickens was accepted at the turn of the century as one substantial Victorian novelist among many, he was not seen as a literary colossus towering over his contemporaries: that was a perception which Chesterton established in the public mind (a perception which led to the publication of the complete Everyman edition of Dickens’s works—many of which were out of print—each with an introduction by Chesterton himself).

As Chesterton had written in his book’s final chapter, ‘It is not likely that wise men will forget [Thackeray]. So, for instance, wise and scholarly men do from time to time return to the lyrists of French Renascence, to the delicate poignancy of Du Bellay: so they will go back to Thackeray. But I mean that Dickens will bestride and dominate our time as the vast figure of Rabelais dominates Du Bellay, dominates the Renascence and the world.’ T.S.Eliot wrote on Chesterton’s death that his Charles Dickens was the ‘best essay on that author that has ever been written’. In our own time, Peter Ackroyd recently concluded that Chesterton was ‘perhaps Dickens’s best critic’.

His book was acclaimed on its publication, as his book on Robert Browning had been (like Charles Dickens, it is still highly regarded: in the words of his latest biographer, Ian Finlayson, ‘Chesterton’s Robert Browning has never been bettered.’ He went on to produce George Bernard Shaw (1909), William Blake (1910), The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), Robert Louis Stevenson (1927), and Chaucer (1932) . His critical works as a whole make up a corpus of writing which shows Chesterton at his most intellectually penetrating.

"A Note on the Future of Dickens"
Charles Dickens (1906), Chapter xii