THE SUPREMACY OF DICKENS.

Feilding Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 4593, 19 May 1922, Page 2

THE SUPREMACY OF DICKENS.

Feilding has its quota of ardent admirors of Charles Dickens, and they will have been just as interested as any other part of the Empire, and will have rejoicod heartily over the significance, of the prices realised at the Burdott - Coutts' sale of Dickensiana in London, particulars of which are being cabled daily. The first surprising news was that the autographed MS. of "The Haunted Man" had been sold to an American collector for the big sum of £3700. Tho same dealer, who holds commissions from private collectors and libraries across tho Atlantic, paid a further large sum for a collection of lottcrs written by Dickens. These sales of MS.S. are a splendid tribute to the survival of tho spirit of Dickens, still the greatest delineator of the middlo and lower classes. There is no writer in the English language to equal his portrait gallery of typea. And the humanness of Charles Dickens stands unrivalled. The great demands in recent years for his MS. is equalled by the perennial patronage of his works, which sell steadily' year by year, rivalling the most popular of novels that are. the vogue. Not to know the works of Dickens is not to know phrases familiar as household words; and not to know his characters is to bo amongst the ignorant." It is truer than over that ho or sho who is not familiar with the Bible and the works of Shakespeare and Dickens cannot hope to be an English scholar.