“To my great delight, ... I had not been in the room many minutes before I was introduced to Douglas Jerrold, who was flitting about with that peculiar restlessness of eye, speech, and demeanour, which was amongst his most marked characteristics. I confess I was not surprised to find him a man of small stature, as I had heard before that his proportions were rather those of Tydeus than of Alcides; but I was a little astonished when I saw in the author of Black-eyed Susan, The Rent Day, and The Wedding Gown, (all of which pieces and many others he had then produced), an amount of boyish gaiety and a rapidity of movement which one could hardly expect from a writer who had risen to high rank as a moralist and censor.”

“He had none of the airs of success or reputation, none of the affectations, either personal or social, which are rife everywhere. He was manly and natural; free and off-handed to the verge of eccentricity. Independence and marked character seemed to breathe from the little, rather bowed figure, crowned with a lion-like head and falling light hair—to glow in the keen, eager, blue eyes glancing on either side as he walked along. Nothing could be less commonplace, nothing less conventional, than his appearance in a room or in the streets.”

“He was a very short man, but with breadth enough, and a back excessively bent—bowed almost to deformity; very gray hair, and a face and expression of remarkable briskness and intelligence. His profile came out pretty boldly, and his eyes had the prominence that indicates, I believe, volubility of speech; nor did he fail to talk from the instant of his appearance; and in the tone of his voice, and in his glance, and in the whole man, there was something racy—a flavour of the humourist. His step was that of an aged man, and he put his stick down very decidedly at every foot-fall; though, as he afterwards told me, he was only fifty-two, he need not yet have been infirm.”—1856.