Leacock's Dickens

CHARLES DICKENS--Stephen Leacock-- Doubleday, Doran ($3). Dyed-in-the-wool Dickensians may enjoy reading this new version of an old and favorite subject, but even they will not grant full marks to the Charles Dickens of Stephen Leacock, head of the political economy department at Canada's McGill University and oldtime popular humorist. Almost universally appreciative when he is writing of Dickens' books, Biographer Leacock is also sympathetic when it comes to his hero's private life. But he considers that Dickens never completely acquired good taste, thinks this lack and a kind of nervous egotism responsible for the reiterated attacks he made on U. S. literary pirates on his first trip to the U. S. Leacock believes Dickens had no very good excuse to separate from his wife, after 23 years and ten children, considers his manifesto in Household Words announcing the separation an inexplicable offense. Not all Dickensians will agree with Author Leacock that the circumstantial description of Paul Dombey's death is too strong meat for modern literary stomachs; but all should be interested in his ingenious theory of how Dickens meant to finish Edwin Drood. In his concluding pages Biographer Leacock unbosoms himself of sentiments that would have warmed the cheeks of Egotist Dickens: ". . . The name of Dickens has not yet been put where it belongs. Whole courses are devoted to Shakespeare, a man--or a collection of men--of far lesser genius. ... In due time it will be known that the works of Charles Dickens represent the highest reach of the world's imaginative literature."

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