Charles Dickens

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Quoting the foreword to the 1942 Readers Club edition by Alexander Woollcott: “This happiest work by the late Gilbert Keith Chesterton, God rest his soul, is as luminous and infectious a book as ever one author wrote about another.” [Chesterton died in 1936-ed. note.] Woollcott goes on to quote Chesterton in a passage near the book’s end: “‘The hour of absinthe is over,’ sang Mr. Chesterton (this was in 1906, of course. ‘We shall not be much further troubled with the little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows and too clean for their delights. But we have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant: and the passage is along a rambling English road, a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick travelled. But this at least is part of what he meant; that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel; but that rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for ever. The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters; and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the rtavern at the end of the world.’”