Douglas-Fairhurst 2011

Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. Becoming Dickens: the Invention of a Novelist. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.

• 237: Going through Bleak House, Forster worried that the spikily satirical representation of Skimpole was too obviously based on the poet and essayist Leigh Hunt. Dickens smoothed it down. Even when he said things Dickens would have preferred not to hear, such as that Little Nell needed to die if The Old Curiosity Shop was to be completed satisfactorily, a sacrifice both to the marketplace and to the demands of the plot, Dickens listened and did as Forster urged. What these revisions shared was a concern for correctness that was as much moral as aesthetic. They reflected Forster's conviction that what his period needed was improving literature: writing that was better not just because it was funnier or more moving than anything published before, but because it was designed to make its readers feel better, act better. And if Dickens was to be literature's champion, then Forster was happy to act as his squire: a guide, goad, and collaborator all in one.
  • Sources for potential tie to Victorian Rebinding:
    • James A. Davies, John Forster: A Literary Life, Leicester UP, 1983
    • Forster, "Remarks on Two oft the Annuals," Newcastle Magazine (1829), 27-38
    • Forster, "Encouragement of Literature by the State," Examiner, 5 January 1850, 2
      • commenting on Thackeray's representation of the literary profession in Pendennis
    • Forster, "The Dignity of Literature," Examiner, 19 Jan 1850, 35