What My Lover Said
pounds on account as soon as the manuscript was received. Sir Walter himself refers to the controversy in the general preface to his works, saying that it had “some alliance to probability, and indeed might have proved in some degree true,” only as it happened when brother Thomas tried to buckle down to the work of writing a novel, he found he could not do it.
Forster, in his life of Dickens, refers to “a wonderful story originally promulgated in America,” to the effect that George Cruikshank and not Dickens was the real author of Oliver Twist; but, Mr. Forster adds, “the distinguished artist whom it calumniates, either not conscious of it or not caring to defend himself, has been left undefended from the slander.” Whereupon, to the astonishment of every one, Cruikshank wrote a letter to the London Times stating that the story was true—that both the plot and the invention of the characters in Oliver Twist were his—and of course there were many people who believed it, although the truth was that his whole contribution had been to suggest the character of Fagin.
If Cruikshank had been a woman, as Mrs. Thomas Scott was, and posed as a shy and retiring creature, wronged by man’s inhumanity but too diffident to fight for the laurels justly hers, there would have been no dearth of cham-
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