Concealing and revealing

In 1837 The Quarterly Review’s anonymous critic — actually, one Abraham Hayward — turned his attention to Charles Dickens, then in the first flaring of his popularity as the author of Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.

In 1837 The Quarterly Review’s anonymous critic — actually, one Abraham Hayward — turned his attention to Charles Dickens, then in the first flaring of his popularity as the author of Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. ‘It requires no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate,’ wrote Hayward. ‘He has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick.’

A bit mean, but very funny, of Michael Slater to quote this Victorian prognosticator — a literary ancestor of William Rees-Mogg or Anatole Kaletsky. So far from coming down like a stick has been Dickens’s reputation that one wonders at first what a new biographer has to bring.