“The idea of an innocent boy establishing unconsciously an immense influence over the mind of a hunted felon … haunted Dickens’s imagination until he gathered round it a whole new world of characters and incidents.”
“If I had been Chief justice of England when that high priest of ‘natural selection’ first tried to oust me out of the fee-simple of my species, I would have given him an illustration of ‘the struggle for existence’ he wouldn't have relished.”
“[President Andrew Johnson] has been the great stirrer-up of disaffection at the South, and the virtual leader of the Southern reactionary party.”
“Having converted the loyal blacks from slaves into the condition of citizens of the United States, there can be no reason or justice or policy in allowing them to be made, in localities recently Rebel, the subjects of whites who have but just purged themselves from the guilt of treason.”
"Few who take the book up will leave it until they have read it through."