“What we want is a number of young people of talent and character who…” — Sydney Dobell

“What we want is a number of young people of talent and character who should resolve to make themselves thoroughly competent not to write, but to read.”

Giving attentive and cultivated reading priority over the ambition to become an author · Letter to a young sister, 12 January 1858

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Sydney Dobell

About Sydney Dobell

5 April 1824–22 August 1874

Sydney Thompson Dobell was born on 5 April 1824 at Cranbrook in Kent, into a family whose circumstances placed him close to the commercial and dissenting middle-class culture of provincial England rather than to the aristocratic literary world. His father, Thomas Dobell, was a wine merchant, and the business of…

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