SOURCE: “The Least Possible Nuisance,” in Times Literary Supplement, November 6, 1998, pp. 28–29.

In the following positive review, Dinnage applauds the lucidity and honesty of Forster's writing in Precious Lives.

Why need the annals of the poor be short and simple? If they are short, it is because (in Thomas Gray's time and often in ours) they live less long; if simple, because they leave little record, and have no one to write it for them. No family trees, obituaries, heirlooms, or even wills worth mentioning—certainly no biographies. But that the lives of the unrecorded are any less rich than those of their betters I have always doubted. Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor of 1851 was a revelation about the unimaginably poor; and, of course, there was Dickens. This century has opened up a crack through which writers can tell us about humble backgrounds they know at first...