Charles Dickens' "for good and for evil" and "superlative degree of comparison"

Basically, what he had just finished saying. That people of the day were not ambivalent about their opinion of the times. They loved it or they hated it. There was no middle ground.

By "superlative degree of comparison" he means using the extreme form of the adjective, typically using the -est (fastest) or pairing with the word most (most expensive).

So when he says, "for good or for evil" he means people would only have used these extreme forms to describe the period. But that some would have thought things the best they could be and others would have thought the complete opposite.

The OP does not ask or say specifically, but I wonder whether the odd use of "received" has contributed to her difficulty. Dickens seems to be using it to mean "assessed". So: "insisted on its being assessed only in the strongest possible terms of either approval or disapproval"?