And indeed, if his parents could have foreseen the future, they would have had cause to be much more satisfied. For •when the fragile little boy was sent into his cousin’s blacking warehouse, he entered a better school, as it happened, than his father could have chosen for him. It was an infinitely more painful school than Harrow or Eton, but for one whose destined work was to describe the poorer houses and streets of London, and the many varieties of life, odd and sad, laughter-moving and pitiful, that swarmed in them, it was a more instructive school, it was the true road to knowledge. The chances were that a delicate boy like him succumbed to his wretchedness, and that a clever boy like him became a rogue and vagabond; but he survived these dangers and became a great novelist. Instead of sinking into the depths of the thronging atoms, he rose above them, or kept apart from them, observed them, and became their describer.

It is impossible to say how this watchful habit began, and when it connected itself with his love of literary distinction. We have Dickens’s own testimony that he was a singularly observant child, and that at a very early period he had an ambition to become “a learned and distinguished man,” but it would be going too far to suppose that from his childhood he held himself apart and kept a keen eye on the doings of others with a view to making capital out of his observations. At first in all likelihood the distinction which he coveted was a kind of distinction that seemed to him possible only through the medium of grammar-schools and universities. To the last no doubt he regretted this want of academical study, and believed that it had placed him at a disadvantage. Still accident is so very much better a schoolmaster than design, that from the first it gave him also the literary training needful to make him a painter of manners. His father, the navy pay clerk, had a small collection of books, with which the “very small and not over-particularly taken care of boy” had made himself familiar while he was living at Chatham, before his experiences in Camden Town and the blacking warehouse. Among these books were Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Robinson Crusoe, the Arabian Nights, Mrs Inchbald’s Farces, and the Tales of the Genii. This literature did not glide over the boy’s mind like water over marble; it found congenial soil, and fell into it as seed. He lived the life of his favourite characters. “I have been Tom Jones,” he says, putting his own case into the mouth of David Copperfield “sa child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature), for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of voyages and travels—I forget what now—that were on these shelves; and for days and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees, the perfect realization of Captain Somebody of the Royal British navy, in danger of being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price.” And then follows something still more suggestive, as showing his tendency to connect these ideal creations with the world of sense around him. “Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard had some association of its own in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Piper go climbing up the church steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr Pickle in the parlour of our little village alehouse.” Even thus early, too, he tried to imitate what he read, wrote a tragedy founded on one of the Tales of the Genu, and acquired great fame in his own circle as a teller of stories.

A boy with this preliminary training was excellently prepared for a course of strange and painful experiences. The bitter contrast between the ideal world in which he had lived, and the miserable poverty in which he spent the first three years of his life in London, making himself useful at home, running errands, carrying things to the pawnbrokers, visiting his father in the Marshalsea, into which the poor man and his family soon drifted, tying up pots of blacking at the warehouse, prowling about cook-shops, à-la-mode beef-shops, and coffee-shops, a shabbily clad and insufficiently fed little boy, seeking to invest his livelihood of a shilling a day to the best advantage, helped to fix these experiences and the many odd scenes and characters with which they brought him in contact more indelibly on his memory. According to his own account, intensely as he felt the misery and shame of this kind of life, he was not without a perception of its humorous side. He used to say that, incredible as it might appear, he looked upon things then very much as he did afterwards. He even began to make attempts to sketch what he saw. Colman’s Broad Grins was lent him by some kind people—another wise provision on the part of the great schoolmaster Accident; and with this before him as a stimulus, he actually sketched the barber who came to shave his bachelor uncle, the old charwoman who helped his mother, and laid the foundation of subsequent sketches,—Mrs Pipchin, the little Marchioness, Bob Sawyer’s lodgings, and many other characters and scenes to which we have not the same direct traces. He was pursuing his education, in fact, as thoroughly as if he had been a pupil in a painter’s studio. He was serving his apprenticeship. He could not have been better employed if he had been the holder of an endowment for research.

Dickens himself by no means looked upon it in that light. It was with difficulty, twenty-five years afterwards, that he could bring himself to speak of this period of his life. In his eyes it was a miserable servitude, from which he was happily relieved by a quarrel between his father and one of the partners in the warehouse when he was rather more than twelve years old, and sent to a school in Mornington Place, where he consorted with more respectable boys, and had some chance of book learning. If his father’s fortunes had been equal to it, he might now have passed through a regular course of grammar-school and university training, and thereby perhaps been incapacitated for the work to which he was called. But fortunately he was soon again thrown chiefly on his own resources. At the age of fifteen he was engaged as an office-boy by an attorney in Gray’s Inn at a salary of 13s. 6d., and afterwards 15s. a week. Here again he had a good field for observation, and did not fail to use it, for his employer afterwards recognized in Pickwick and Nickleby several incidents that took place in his office, and professed also to identify some of the characters. With Mr Blackmore he remained for eighteen months. During that time his father became a newspaper parliamentary reporter, and the office-boy, who had lost none of his thirst for distinction, and spent all his spare time reading hard in the British Museum, resolved to qualify himself for a similar occupation. He mastered the difficulties of short-hand, and in November 1828 obtained employment as a reporter in Doctors’ Commons. He spent two years reporting law cases, practising in Doctors’ Commons and the other law courts. It would be difficult to conceive a more perfect way of completing the education of the future novelist, giving him an insight into the strange by-paths of that higher stratum of society of which he had before had little experience. At the age of nineteen he entered the parliamentary gallery to enlarge his knowledge still further. He was a reporter of political speeches in and out of Parliament for five years from 1831 to 1836. First he reported for the True Sun, then for the Mirror of Parliament, finally for the Morning Chronicle. In his excursions into the country, and back with his “copy,” he saw the last of the old coaching days and of the old inns that were a part of them; but it will be long, as Mr Forster remarks, “before the readers of his living page see the last of the life of either.”

His first published piece of original writing appeared in the Old Monthly Magazine for January 1834. The title was “A Dinner at Poplar” (“Mr Minns ”), one of the pieces afterwards published as Sketches by Boz, the nom de plume which he adopted from the nickname of one of his brothers. He wrote nine of these sketches for the Monthly Magazine, and then he was engaged to write some for an evening offshoot to the Morning Chronicle. The first series of Sketches by Boz was collected and published in two volumes in the February of 1836, with illustrations by George Cruickshank. The first edition was exhausted in a few months; a second was called for in August. The Sketches had at once attracted attention. No wonder, for in them we find already in full swing the unflagging delight in pursuing the humorous side of a character, and the inexhaustible fertility in inventing ludicrous incidents, which had only to be displayed on a large scale to place him ‘at once on a pinnacle of fame. There are many of them, such as the Parish, the Boarding House, Mr Minns and his Cousin, and the misplaced attachment of Mr John Dounce, which show Dickens’s humour at its very richest. He had formed, too, by this time his characteristic likes and dislikes, and plays them off upon his butts and favourites with the utmost frankness. The delight in homely sociability and cheerfulness, in the innocent efforts of simple people to make merry, the kindly satire of their little vanities and ambitions, the hearty ridicule of dry fogies who shut themselves up in selfish cares and reserves, and of sour mischief-makers who take pleasure in conspiring against the enjoyment of their neighbours,—these tendencies, which remained with Dickens to the last, are strongly marked in the Sketches, though lighter-hearted in their expression than in his later works. The mark and indispensable condition of all great work is there, that which Mr Carlyle calls veracity—the description of what the writer has himself seen, heard, and felt, the fearless utterance of his own sentiments in his own way.

The first number of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was issued in April 1836. The story of its origin was first authentically told in the preface to the edition of 1847. Some of the details were afterwards slightly modified. The first thought of the work did not originate with Dickens, although the whole character of it was determined by him. The publishers, Messrs Chapman & Hall, and Mr Seymour the artist, had agreed to issue a monthly serial to be illustrated by Mr Seymour, and they went to Dickens, whose Sketches had attracted their attention, to propose that he should write the letterpress of this “monthly something.” Their idea was that the author should describe the adventures of a “Nimrod Club,” the members of which should go out shooting, fishing, and so forth, and getting themselves into difficulties through their want of dexterity. Dickens undertook the monthly something, but obtained the required diverting incidents by a different machinery, namely, the Pickwick Club. The first four numbers went off slowly; the demand first became “brisk” after the fifth number, in which Sam Weller made his appearance. But by the discerning few the value of the work was recognized; and one of them, Mr Bentley the publisher, only a few weeks before fame came to the author with its capricious and overwhelming suddenness, engaged him to undertake the editing of a monthly magazine to be started the following January, and to write a serial story for it, and further made an agreement with him for the writing of two other tales at a specified early date. Of∣he vexation arising out of this agreement, when the huge success of the Pickwick Papers showed its terms to be inadequate, and Dickens was disposed to resent it as a selling of himself into slavery, and of the manner in which the bargain was re-adjusted, an account is given by Mr Forster from the author’s point of view. Nine monthly numbers of the Pickwick Papers were published in 1836; eleven more in 1837; by November of the latter year the sale had reached 40,000 copies, Pickwick had become a popular hero and godfather to innumerable articles of merchandise, and Sam Weller’s sayings were catchwords in the street and the household wherever the English language was spoken.

In the first excitement of success, the young author’s appetite for work was unbounded. In 1837 he wrote his monthly instalments of the Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist side by side, not even by a week in advance of the printer with either. They kept him fully occupied, and held in abeyance for that year a taste which from his youth to the end of his career was strong in him, and had no inconsiderable influence upon his style as a painter of manners. In his childhood at Chatham he got his first experience of fame as the author of a tragedy; at the school in Mornington Place he and his companions mounted small theatres and acted small plays; when in the attorney’s office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields he frequented minor theatres, the nature of which he has caricatured in the Sketches, and not unfrequently engaged in parts; one of his first published sketches, “Mrs Joseph Porter Over the Way,” is a description of private theatricals in a stage-struck family. In 1836, before his serial engagements multiplied, he wrote a farce called the Strange Gentleman, and a short comedy with songs called the Village Coquettes. It is strange that with this passion for the stage, which he always retained, he should not have written more plays. He probably felt that in this kind of composition he had but the use of his left hand, and did not care to risk his reputation where he had no field for those powers of description and narrative over which he had proved his mastery. But though he did not write plays, and finally sought no outlet for his theatrical longings except in amateur acting and in reading from his own novels, the habit of realizing incidents as they would appear on the stage is unmistakably apparent in his work. He constantly seems to be working up scenes to the pitch of stage effect, elaborating the actions of his characters as if he were inventing “business” for a player, suggesting, in fact, an exuberance of business far beyond the capabilities of any human performer.

We doubt whether the fact that Dickens did not write plays is explained by saying that his genius was descriptive and narrative, but not dramatic. There is plenty of the raw material of dramatic action in his dialogues. He probably could have written a good acting play if he had tried. His characters are essentially theatrical, though their story is told according to the laws of the novel, and not according to the laws of the drama. The explanation of his not having tried to write plays we take to be simply that he discovered full employment for his powers in another direction before he had applied himself to the art of constructing plays. Dickens was eminently a practical man, and, when publishers were fighting for his novels, he directed his whole energy to meeting the demand without seeking to experiment on other modes of composition. As some compensation to Mr Bentley for releasing him from the strict terms of the agreement we have mentioned, he edited a life of Grimaldi, which was published in 1838; but after that he put his whole strength into the art of writing sketches and serial tales. As soon as Pickwick was off his hands, and before Oliver Twist was yet completed, he made an agreement with Chapman & Hall “to write a new work, the title whereof should be determined by him, of a similar character and of the same extent as the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club;” and between April 1838 and October 1839 he produced the Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.

Before the end of the serial publication of Nickleby, he had conceived a new project, partly with a view to relief from the strain of writing a continuous story in instalments with the printer at his heels, and partly with a view to getting more profit for himself out of his labours. This was a weekly publication, to be edited by himself, and to contain sketches, essays, tales, adventures, and letters from imaginary correspondents. He was to receive a certain sum every week for what was written, and was besides to share half the profits with the publishers. When the scheme was agreed to by the publishers, he proceeded to release himself from other engagements by resigning the editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany, and getting clear of his obligation to write Barnaby Budge for jWγ Bentley in consideration of his buying the copyright and stock of Oliver Twist for £2250. He thus started clear with Master Humphrey's Clock, the title upon which he fixed for his new publication....