19 DECEMBER 1908, Page 26

Charles Dickens, the Apostle of the People. By Edwin Pugh.

(The New Age Press. 5s. net.)—Mr. Pugh has certainly some- thing worth hearing to say about Dickens. And we may make use of it without accepting some strange dicta which we find in his book. We may admire Dickens without thinking that "a terribly long series of terribly long novels" is an adequate account of Scott's novels. We may still appreciate a gentleman though Mr. Pugh "has no use for the word." And we may doubt whether Dickens would have been a Socialist if he had known what Socialism was. Of one thing we are quite certain. If Socialism had been the rule of public and private life in England, there would have been no Dickens. Mr. Pugh himself is to clever for that dead level.