Dickens took great interest in theatrical affairs, and was very fond of theatrical society. He had a lifelong affection for , and a great regard for … - Edmund Yates

Seriously, Frank Churchill, it's time you began to look after a wife. In our profession, especially, it's the greatest blessing to have some one to care for and to be petted by in the intervals of business-strife. There used to be a notion that a literary man required to be perpetually 'seeing life,' which meant 'getting drunk, and never going home;' but that's exploded, and I believe that our best character-painters owe half their powers of delineation to their wives' suggestions. Women,—by Jove sir!—women read character wonderfully.

I look back to the six years which I passed at the with very little pleasure. The headmaster, Dr. Dyne was a capable pedagogue enough, not more than usually narrow-minded, priggish, and conventional. He was a type of the old-fashioned pedantic school, which looked upon Oxford as the "hub of the universe," thought the study of Latin and the primary object of our creation, despised modern languages and foreign countries, and believed thoroughly in the virtues of corporal punishment.

Gone is , with its very wide open pens and cattle-hutches; and gone with it is a good deal of the scandal of driving the wretched beasts through the streets, and whacking and torturing them in the most dreadful fashion. Enormous hordes of cattle for Smithfield Monday market, then—not as now, sent up by rail, bur driven long tedious journeys—used to arrive at on the Saturday, and pass the Sunday in the fields let out for the purpose.