A NEW DICKENS

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 291, 8 September 1928, Page 8

A NEW DICKENS

DEPICTED IN RECENT NOVEL FAMOUS OLD AUTHOR MALIGNED ALLEGED INTIMATE INCIDENTS IN LIFE (Australian Press Association.) (Rec. September 7, 7.5 p.m.) London, September 7. A literary sensation is expected in the publication of a novel. “This Side Idolatry,” by “Ephesian,” the pen name of Carl Eric Bechliofer Roberts. The publishers claim that the author originally conceived the book as a biography, based on research in England, Germany, Italy, and America, but changed the form to a novel owing to restrictions upon the quotation of Dickens’s letters. The ‘Daily Chronicle” says: “The book is likely to stir all Dickens lovers to anger. The author purports to re-, veal intimate incidents in Dickens’s life in the form of dialogue, from which a quite different Dickens from the traditional view is set., out. The author accuses Dickens of parsimony, foppery, vanity, of spitefully caricaturing his own parents, and being guilty of effeminate streaks. The author claims that the truth of Dickens’s separation from his wife has never been told. After the wife had borne him ten children he accused her of neglecting them and of mental derangement, and quarrelled with her continually, owing to her alleged extravagance. The author purports to reveal Dickens’s affairs with an actress and other women.” The “Chronicle” adds: “Friends of the Dickens family are indignant at the slurs cast on the character of Dickens, and vigorously deny the alleged new facts.” t Mr. Pett Ridge, in an 1 interview, said: “What is the use of a great novelist qualifying for burial in Westminster Abbey, and being universally mourned by his contemporaries, if reputation-snatchers are allowed to write such tt muck-raking book. If I were a young descendant of Dickens I would break open a money-box and buy a horse-whip.”