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We have heard much within recent years for and against fiction “with a purpose,” as though this was some new literary manifestation. Among the best remembered writers of the early Victorian era are just those who had a purpose other than that of merely amusing their readers—Thackeray and Dickens are of course the two most striking examples. The author’s purpose is often the salt not only flavouring his work for immediate contemporaries, but also preserving it for future readers. That with Douglas Jerrold this purpose counted for much we have his own words to show. Prefacing one of his serial ventures he said: “It will be our chief object to make every essay—however brief, and however light and familiar in its treatment—breathe with a purpose. Experience assures us that, especially at the present day, it is by a defined purpose alone, whether significant in twenty pages or in twenty lines, that the sympathies of the world are to be engaged, and its support insured.” That this conviction was at the back of the greater part of Douglas Jerrold’s writings no student of his work can fail to recognise. The fact is perhaps answerable for much of his work having enjoyed but a temporary popularity, for there are two ways of writing “with a purpose”—the first the topical or journalistic way, and the second the general or more philosophical. Yet if Douglas Jerrold expended himself to a considerable extent over the particular, he by no means neglected the general, of which there is abundant testimony in this volume, as well as in St Giles and St James, The Story of a Feather, Punch’s Letters, and that little book of golden philosophy, The Chronicles of Clovernook.