... Wells has many affinities with Dickens. He does not possess Dickens's glorious humour. He has never been able to realise that even in mean street… - Sidney Dark

, so Shakespeare relates, was often at the in , and there was the wonderful meetings of poets—Beaumont, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare himself—at the famous on the south side of .

Great literature is the creation of its age and its nation. It is inconceivable that Shakespeare's plays could have been written anywhere but in England and at any time but the later Renaissance. ... But while great literature is the child of one age it is the father of the next. As a nation reads, so it becomes. Let me decide what the people shall read, and you may make their laws. In saying this I am not merely referring to social and political and philosophic treatises. I am thinking of the whole gamut of a library, and particularly of works of the imagination.

... Dickens is to me a writer apart. I have been reading and re-reading his novels since I was six. I know his characters as I hardly know any of the men and women I have met in the flesh. Dickens is the novelist of the lettered and of the unlettered. The man at the street corner who has hardly heard of Thackeray knows all about and .