Abstract
We recall from our schooldays Bacon’s essay ‘Of Truth’ and especially its arresting beginning: ‘What is Truth; said jesting Pilate; And would not stay for an answer.’ Victorians rarely jested about such matters, Charles Dickens among them. When the accuracy of what he had written was questioned, he was wont to insist that it was the truth. Today in dealing with large matters, we sense that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth rarely stops to be caught. Even our friends spot this whenever we generalise, and how our ‘truths’ will look in another century we are blessed in not knowing.
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Notes
John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (1871; London: Chapman & Hall, Gadshill Edition, n.d.) I, iii, 195–6.
G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, the Last of the Great Men (1906; New York: Readers Club, 1942) 101, 106.
Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the American, ed. Donald Smalley (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1974) 41–2.
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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McCarthy, P. (1999). Truth in American Notes. In: Sadrin, A. (eds) Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27354-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27354-6_6
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