Pickivickian Studies. By Percy Fitzgerald. (New Century Press. 5s.)—Dickens identifications
make an amusing subject, if too much is not made of them, or originals are not ingeniously invented where, in all probability, the author was drawing from imagination. Eatanswill is shown to be Ipswich, though with some dissimilarities thrown in, it can hardly be doubted, of set Purpose. The 'White Horse' is there, scarcely disguised at all. Here Dickens was not improbably paying off an old slight, for the " overgrown tavern" is described in very unfriendly terms. All this goes well enough, but it is not so when we are asked to identify Mr. Editor Pott with Dr. Maginn. Whatever faults Maginn may have had, he was not a fool. There would be no force in satire where the dissimilarity was so great. One of the studies deals with Bath, and is particularly good; the oversights are pointed out, but then Dickens was always full of oversights. Some day, perhaps, the " higher critics " will build an ingenious hypothesis on them. The mistakes in the military portion of " Pickwick" are indeed curious. It might be most reasonably argued that the writer had never seen a soldier. Nothing in the book is more interesting than the account of the "Calverley Examination Paper." There never was a cleverer burlesque, but then "C. S. C." was a master of burlesque.
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