1 96 RISEN B V PERSE VE RANGE. 



seaside resort. The work itself in its purpose was directed 

 against the Court of Chancery, for its enormous waste of time 

 and costly procedure. For the advance sheets of the book, 

 200c dollars are said to have been paid by Messrs. Harper 

 Brothers, the New York publishers. 



The work was inscribed, perhaps very justly, to Thomas 

 Carlyle. This work was one of the least successful of his 

 books with the general public. In a letter to Charles Knight 

 acknowledging the receipt of a copy of his work Knowledge is 

 Power, he described the aim of his book thus : ' My satire is 

 against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else ; 

 the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice 

 of this time ; the men who, through long years to come, will 

 do more to damage the really useful truths of political 

 economy than I could do, if I tried, in my whole life ; the 

 addled heads who would take the average of cold in the 

 Crimea during twelve months as a reason for clothing a soldier 

 in nankeen on a night when he would be frozen to death in 

 fur ; and who would comfort the labourer, in travelling twelve 

 miles a day to and from his work, by telling him that the 

 average distance of one inhabited place from another on the 

 whole area of England is not more than four miles. Bah ! 

 what have you to do with these ? ' 



In October 1855, soon after the commencement of Little 

 Dorrit, Dickens returned to London, to preside at a dinner 

 given to W. M. Thackeray, previous to his departure for 

 America on a lecturing tour. He made, as usual, a felicitous 

 speech on the occasion. The first monthly jDortion of 

 Thackeray's great novel. Vanity Fair, made its appearance 

 on the ist of February 1847, when the sunshine of critical and 

 public favour dawned upon its author. But his writings, 



