Another recent Goodwill find has been the Leavises' collection of critical essays on Dickens, in a volume they title Dickens the Novelist--the Leavises being (though you might already know this) the irascible, influential husband-and-wife team who taught English literature at Cambridge University in the mid-twentieth century to students of Sylvia Plath's and A. S. Byatt's generation: pre-French-deconstructionist critics, who actually offered personal comments about books and didn't use any parenthetical spelling tricks to make criticism look more special: e.g., "I am a (m)other; are you (an)other?" and suchlike crap. (Can you tell that just the sound of Foucault's name makes my eyes roll back into my head? Can you tell I've edited way too many Lacan-quoting, ass-kissing, tenure-questing ex-dissertations? Can you tell that my husband and I have wasted a fair amount of time inventing "Derrida walked into a bar . . . " jokes without any punch lines and have also considered a line of T-shirts printed with "I'm with That Poststructuralist Scum [add thick black arrow here]"?)

But back to the Leavises. I knew about them but hadn't read any of their writings until George Core, editor of the Sewanee Review, sent me a photocopy of Mrs. L's excoriation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which I ended up quoting in my Fanny Price essay. I always appreciate a crank; and it turns out that this particular crank may have hated Fanny but she adores Dickens. Well, so do I. We will be cranks on the same side of the fence this time.

Plus, the book opens with this fine if somewhat oddly worded epigraph, quoted from Henry James's The Figure in the Carpet:

Isn't there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn't write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely?