THE NOVELIST OF DEMOCRACY.

Northland Age, Volume 2, Issue 44, 12 June 1906, Page 7

THE NOVELIST OF DEMOCRACY.

At the first meeting of the Dickens Fellowship in New York, Dr. H. M. Leipziger, who has charge of the Lecture Bureau of the Board of Education, said the board kept five lecturers in the field telling of Dickens and his works, and in whatever partj of the city they spoke they were always sure of large and appreciative; audiences. He said that when he was in charge of the great library on the east side, which is now pj i branch of the New York Public Lij brary, more of Dickens's works were j called for than those of any other | writer, and this was the more re-j I markable because the district irj I which the books were circulated was populated almost entirely by immigrants, the greatest number of them I being Jews from Russia. | Dr. Leipziger explained this unij versitality of the Dickens cult by saying that Dickens was the novelist j of democracy ; he explained its ideal** | he wrote ofithe problems with which | the common people were familiar ; | his heroes and heroines were the real ones of every-day life, and there j was no heart that could not be 1 touched by his pathos, as an illus- | tration of which he quoted Bret Harte’s account of the reading of Dickens in a Western mining camp. Dickens, he said, appealed to the best that was in a man and was essentially a writer who did his readers good.