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any new book of yours must be inferior to that, and because it is so rare a thing for a prodigious fame to be sustained by a second book; but, in my own mind I am entirely convinced that the second book is by far the best.
Such faults as you have are in the artistic department, and there is less defect in “Dred” than in Uncle Tom, and the whole material and treatment seem to me richer and more substantial.
I have had critiques of “Dred” from the two very wisest people I know — perfectly unlike each other (the critics, I mean), and they delight me by thinking exactly like each other and like me. They distinctly prefer it to Uncle Tom.
To say the plain truth, it seems to me so splendid a work of genius that nothing that I can say can give you an idea of the intensity of admiration with which I read it. It seemed to me, as I told my nieces, that our English fiction writers had better shut up altogether and have done with it, for one will have no patience with any but didactic writing after yours.
My nieces (and you may have heard that Maria, my nurse, is very, very clever) are thoroughly possessed with the book, and Maria says she feels as if a fresh department of human life had been opened to her since this day week.
I feel the freshness no less, while, from my travels, I can be even more assured of the truthfulness of your wonderful representation.
I see no limit to the good it may do by suddenly splitting open Southern life, for everybody to look into.
It is precisely the thing that is most wanted,--just as Uncle Tom was wanted, three years since, to show what negro slavery in your republic was like.
It is plantation-life, particularly in the present case, that I mean.
As for your
