Attractive oddness ...

... 1)Shakespeare 2)Dickens….? | Bryan Appleyard. (Hat tips to Dave Lull and Rus Bowden.)

Perhaps one of the reasons for such effusions is the attractive oddness of the man. He sticks out of English literature like a sore thumb. To the Victorians, his immediate superstar predecessors were Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Dickens admired Scott and, in his youth, adopted the romantic, dandy style of Byron, but he was like neither. Tomalin links him to Chaucer in his creation of characters, and Slater sees Ben Jonson as both an influence and a precursor. “In his amateur theatricals, he chose Jonson rather than Shakespeare, and he was very fond of Every Man in His Humour.”