Les Pauvres Gens
One of the characters in Dostoevsky's, novel "Poor Folk" (1846), wrote that reading a novel by De Kock was not becoming for ladies. James Joyce's "Ulysses" includes references to Paul De Kock, including innuendos on his name in the Calypso, Sirens and Circe episodes. His novel "The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays" is also mentioned in the Circe episode. In the novel "Pendennis" by Thackeray, the character Major Pendennis' remarks that he had read nothing of the 'novel kind' for thirty years, except Paul de Kock, who certainly made him laugh. The 1920 "Encyclopedia Americana" attributes his popularity abroad to his style, which it describes as his "worst feature . . . barely presentable, a fault evidently due to deficiency of education. . . . the defects of style disappear in translation."