SOURCE: “Thackeray on Dickens,” in Famous Reviews: Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes, by R. Brimley Johnson, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1914, pp. 469–73.

In the following review, originally published in 1844, Thackeray applauds the popular appeal of A Christmas Carol.

Mr. Titmarsh, in Switzerland, to Mr. Yorke

… This introduction, then, will have prepared you for an exceedingly humane and laudatory notice of the packet of works which you were good enough to send me, and which, though they doubtless contain a great deal that the critic would not write (from the extreme delicacy of his taste and the vast range of his learning) also contain, between ourselves, a great deal that the critic could not write if he would ever so; and this is a truth which critics are sometimes apt to forget in their judgments of works of fiction. As a rustical boy, hired at twopence a week...