Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/192

174 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 Genii, 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 pawn-brokers, 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