Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 212, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 September 1915 — STILL REMAINS A PUZZLE [ARTICLE]

STILL REMAINS A PUZZLE

Lovers of Dickens Long Have Pondered Over His Creation of "Harold Sklmpole.” Was Harold Skimpole, In "Bleak House," a caricature of Leigh Hunt? The old literary enigma received attention again by the discovery of a hitherto unpublished letter of Charles Dickens by “C. K. 5.,” reproduced in his literary columns in the London Sphere. This new letter is probably an answer to the last appeal Leigh Hunt made to the novelist to give assurance in a public manner that the wretched creature Skimpole was not a portrait' of himself. Zealous Dickenslans have done their utmost to clear the novelist’s name in respect of this charge of cruelly caricaturing a noble man, but they receive little if any support from Dickens’ own words. And the new letter is only one more evasion. “My dear Leigh Hunt,” he writes from Gad's Hill in June, 1859, “believe me, I have not forgotten that matter; nor will I forget it To alter the book itself would be to revive a forgotten absurdity, and to establish the very association that is to be denied and discarded . . .” But, as “C. K. S.” points out in his commentary on this literary find, there is ample evidence that Dickens was sorry for the portrait and vowed “never to do so any more.”