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“... man. The coincidence is made more striking by the similarities between George Henry Lewes and John Forster. They were two of the stars of Victorian literary journalism: much in demand as editors, and absolutely reliable in their capacity to produce essays and reviews of first-rate quality on a huge range of topics at an intimidating speed. They both ...”

“... Pen, and join forces at North Berwick with his friends the Storys. Before starting, he had told John Forster that Pen and the Storys had persuaded him to this course, but that he meant to stay only a month. The friendship with the Storys was an old and affectionate one: they had met in Italy in 1848. William Wetmore Story was an American sculptor of ...”

“... not through biographies, unless they redounded as much to the honour of the art concerned as did Forster’s Goldsmith, nor through celebratory odes … still less through the erection of monuments, but through the continued circulation and enjoyment of their work. Slater’s splendid new biography is written in this same spirit. He probably knows more than ...”

“... could not, for the life of me, understand. It wouldn’t be until 1872, when the first volume of John Forster’s biography appeared, that Dickens’s wife and children learned about the pots of boot blacking he’d covered (‘first with a piece of oil paper, and then with a piece of blue paper’) for ten hours a day, six shillings a week, while his ...”

“... the composition of the said work’. (Presumably nothing had, in fact, to be repaid, since John Forster recorded that 50,000 copies were sold ‘while the author yet lived’.) The clause shows that Dickens knew he might be dying, but it is also witness to his splendid confidence that nothing short of death or a stroke could stop him composing the ...”

“... William Maginn, and the painter Daniel Maclise. Though the rumours put an end to her engagement to John Forster in 1835, nothing surfaced that she and her friends could not refute or explain away, and once she was dead, and in such a manner, the scandals faded into the background. It was said that she died of an accidental overdose, of tropical ...”

“... excellent Dickens playing the conjuror for one whole hour – the best conjuror I ever saw... and Forster acting as his servant! –This part of the entertainment concluded with a plum pudding made out of raw flour raw eggs – all the raw usual ingredients – boiled in a gentleman’s hat-and tumbled out reeking – all in one minute before the eyes of the ...”

“... author and publisher’. Idly picking up a pencil, he observed it to be the exact counterpart of John Forster: ‘short, thick, and full of lead’. A luckless would-be comrade once told him that, politically, they were rowing in the same boat: ‘but not with the same skulls,’ Jerrold replied. The most durable relics of his wit concern his fellow ...”

“... E.M. Forster wrote a surprising amount of criticism of one kind or another, but he believed that criticism was of almost no use to art or to artists. He certainly regarded himself as an artist, and his own art was fiction, but he said firmly, in a broadcast of 1944, that ‘the novel . . . has not any rules and so there is no such thing as the art of fiction ...”

“... much more than other woman writers, Victorian or contemporary. Writing to Dickens’s biographer, John Forster, about Charlotte Brontë’s forthcoming marriage to her curate Arthur Nicholls, Mrs Gaskell said that Charlotte ‘would never have been happy but with an exacting, rigid, passionate, law-giving man ... could never have borne not to be ...”

“... who describe 17th-century England as a country ridden with class hatred, but 1688 bore it out. John Miller’s Seeds of Liberty, although emphasising the dependence of the Revolution on its acceptance by a broad and well-informed political nation, concedes that the nobles led and the people followed. A hundred years later the principle of deference looked ...”

“... doctoring the mad – the pauper mad, generally – had a taint of its own. As the alienist Sir John Bucknill acerbically wrote in 1860, ‘the feeling and conduct of the British public towards the insane reminds one of nothing so much as that of the enlightened citizens of the free States of America. Noble and just sentiments towards the negro race are in ...”

“... thoughtfulness that he later accused her of lacking was especially hurtful. He wrote to his friend John Forster that she ‘wants to know whether you have “any books to send her”. If you have any literary rubbish on hand, please to shoot it here.’ She responded to every slight with unshakeable loyalty, even after Dickens had turned her out of the ...”

“... again. She ignores this news and gives him a smiling farewell as she gets into her carriage. E.M. Forster thought the scene one of the most odious in the novel, or rather in the Novel, and he seems to assume, rather naively, that Proust is as shocked by the incident as he is. Forster’s reaction suggests the existence of ...”