Inverarity is not a Scottish village

Your reviews show, as a rule, sound judgment and a pleasing ability to convey your emotions and make us sympathize with them. You are an excellent reviewer - and I have read a few. However, as your experience seems largely to do with the last few decades, there are times when you fall into anachronism. You read that Dickens and Trollope wrote for popular magazines; you read that they had great and widespread success; and you imagine that, being "popular" writers, they lacked that "literary" prestige that only time was to bestow on them. But you are ascribing to Dickens and Trollope a distinction that simply did not exist in their time. (http://fpb.livejournal.com/103829.html) The very notion of popular art as opposed to highbrow or serious art simply did not exist in Dickens' formative years; and while it is true that a few canting idiots had begun to castigate his popular success by the time he died, nobody of any importance treated him as anything but a living genius and a great master while he was alive. Sydney Smith, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold - none of whom agreed with his views - all admired him wildly. He made his way to the head of society by the sheer force of his genius; and when he took it on himself to criticize an institution - like, for instance, the Court of Chancery in Bleak House - that institution felt it had to defend himself. He was, that is, both a pop star and a recognized intellectual and moral authority. And the magazines for which he wrote - when he did not publish them himself, since he had a long career as journalist and editor - were not "popular" in any sense we would recognize. I have a bound copy of a year's issues of one - the year being that great and awful year 1860 - and what can clearly be seen is that the publisher aimed to present everything that was most significant about contemporary events and culture. One page might have a poem by Elizabeth BArrett; the next a news report from Garibaldi's invasion of Sicily or from the American electoral campaign; another, yes, a chapter from the latest novel of Trollope or Thackeray. This is not USA TODAY or SPORTS ILLUSTRATED we are talking about; it is more like Norman Mailer or Truman Capote publishing a short story on PLAYBOY magazine, minus the porn, of course.