Playwright, critic, editor, journalist, wit, novelist, and writer of hundreds of essays, short stories, poems, and character sketches, Douglas William Jerrold was one of the most important and influential men of letters of his day. It is safe to say that he knew personally every writer of influence in England at midcentury; certainly every writer, with or without influence, knew him.

In his own lifetime Jerrold was best known--much to his dismay--as a writer of light, entertaining plays and as a journalist. He wanted to establish a reputation as a serious novelist; toward the end of his life he deprecated his plays and his best-known nondramatic work, Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures (1845), as mere amusements. Even some contemporary critics recognized his deficiencies as a dramatist and felt that his most important work might well be in fiction. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1857, James Hannay said that "though...