From "The Bookman," Volume 14:
Reading The Dolly Dialogues again, I recapture the full sensation of wonder with which I read them first. It is a sensation I appear to have all to myself. This claim to originality may be unfounded; any claim to originality is. shown up sooner or later. But, so far as I remember, nobody has done justice to the audacity of these Dialogues. When they came out, we all said they were witty, sparkling, admirably finished, and so forth; but did anybody say that they presented to the charming married ladies of England a pocket-mirror, in which they might see some ambiguous reflections? Lady Mickleham flirts through all the moods and tenses (chiefly the subjunctive mood, I admit) with Mr. Samuel Carter. She was within an ace of marrying Mr. Carter when Lord Mickleham appeared on the scene at Monte Carlo. They gibed together at his shabby clothes while he was still a perfect stranger. When he was found to be an Earl, that was another pair of shoes, and an entirely different set of garments. She jilted Mr. Carter, a mere commoner with a trumpery estate in Hampshire, but accepted from him as a wedding present a brooch which symbolised his fractured heart, and she spent most of her time afterward in mending that organ, or making believe to mend it. This surgery was practised under the nose of her husband, who did not observe it, as he was absorbed in amateur carpentry, or in making locks, like the blameless Louis XVI. Love laughs at locksmiths, and Mr. Carter treated Lord Mickleham with very little ceremony. He even had the effrontery to chronicle a dream in which Lady Dolly obtains admission to the Elysian Fields by kissing Rhadamanthus. (I commend this to the sarcastic French writer who says that English kissing is a process of wiping your lips and beginning again elsewhere.) When Mr. Carter is also admitted, the lady remarks, "Come along and help me to find Archie."
You may say that Mrs. Hilary Musgrave is not a flirt, and that she does her best to find Mr. Carter a wife who will correct the glaring faults of his character. Her choice of a reformer is not happy (see what happens to Mr. Carter when he meets Miss Milton), and I take leave to suspect the sincerity of her efforts. She is devoted to Hilary, no doubt; but she likes to have Mr. Carter as a frequent witness of this devotion. And pray note her astounding behaviour when she learns that another gentleman, smuggled out of the country to escape prosecution for embezzlement, confessed that he took the money in order that he might cut a figure in her society! She is overcome with emotion, and gives Mr. Carter a banknote to be transmitted to the culprit. "Supposing it had been another woman!" says Mr. Carter to himself. You will not find a more cynical reflection upon woman even in Thackeray. I thought we were definitely rid of that "microbe," as somebody described him not long ago in one literary journal. I read in another lately that what Thackeray mistook for "snobbery" is the selfrespecting spirit of emulation. When you see a man toadying wealth or a title, you should know that his soul is struggling upward. A third scribe informs us that Thackeray's teaching was "entirely harmful." That ought to be final; and yet here is Mr. Carter, without any reproach that I have ever seen, insinuating that a perfectly virtuous woman's impulse of generosity toward a fugitive criminal (she had raged at him five minutes earlier) is due to gratified vanity! I have no doubt that Thackeray, in the Elysian Fields (when not helping Lady Dolly to look for Archie, after introducing her to Becky), will rebuke Mr. Carter for out-Heroding Herod.
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* Seventeen Illustrations by Howard Chandler Christy
* 4 more chapters than previously available in other e-book editions:
"Ancient History"
"A Life Subscription"
"A Fatal Obstacle"
"The Curate's Bump"
