Charles Dickens and David Copperfield Review in Fraser's Magazine

How are we to account for [Dickens] wide-spread popularity? Not because the author is faultless—he is too human for that; not because his plots are of absorbing interest—neither Shakespeare’s not Scott’s are so; but because of his kindly, all-pervading charity, which would cover a multitude of failings, because of his genial humour and exquisite comprehension of the national character and manners, because of his tenderness, because of his purity, and, above all, because of his deep reverence for the household sanctities, his enthusiastic worship of the household gods.

View 1850 article on Charles Dickens and David Copperfield from Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country.