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 188 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS possible, in enabling him to prove his power, and he presently made an arrange- ment with the editor of the Evening Chronicle to contribute papers and sketches regularly, continuing to act as reporter for the Morning Chronicle, and getting his salary increased from five guineas to seven guineas a week. To be making an income of nearly four hundred pounds a year at the age of two or three and twenty, would be considered fortunate in any line of life! Sixty years ago, such an income represented a much more solid success than would now be the case. The sketches were collected and published in the beginning of the year 1836, the author receiving a hundred and fifty pounds for the copyright. He afterward bought it back for eleven times that amount. In the last week of March in the same year appeared the first number of the " Pickwick Papers ; " three days af- terward Dickens married the daughter of his friend, George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle, and his early struggles were finished. No article, however short, treating of Charles Dickens, can avoid entering into the details of his early history with a fulness which would be out of all pro- portion to what follows, but for the remarkable fact that the events of his child- hood and his youth impressed his imagination and influenced the whole of his lit- erary career so profoundly, that to the very end of his life there is not a single work in which some of the characters, some of the places, are not derived from his early recollections. Many other writers there are who have passed their childish days among the petites gens, but none who have so remembered their ways, their speech, and their mode of thought. The Marshalsea prison of Little Dorrit is the place where for two years he went in and out. The Queen's Bench and its Rules were close to the Marshalsea ; Bob Sawyer's lodgings in Lant Street were his own ; David Copperfield, the friendless lad in the dingy ware- house, was himself ; the cathedral of Edwin Drood was that in whose shadow he had lived ; Mrs. Pipehin is his old landlady of Camden Town ; the most de- lightful features in Mr. Micawber are borrowed from his own father ; the expe- riences of Doctors' Commons, the solicitor's clerks, the life in chambers, are all his own ; while of individual characters, the list of those which are known to be por- traits more or less true to nature might be indefinitely extended. And yet, while he was early drawing on these early recollections, while they constantly furnished him with scenes and characters, he could not bear to speak of them, and no one except his friend and biographer, Forster, ever knew that he was himself, with all the shabby, mean surroundings in early life, exactly such as Da- vid Copperfield. The rest of Dickens's life has the interest which belongs to success after suc- cess. It was a long, triumphal march. He had no failures ; he suffered no de- feats. There were times when his hand was not at his best, but never a time when his hand lost its power. This indeed seems the crowning happiness of a successful and singularly happy life, that when he was cut off he died June 6, 1870 after fifty-eight years of continuous work, his brain was still as vigorous, his eye as keen, his hand as sure as in the first fresh running of his youth. It was indeed more than literary success which he achieved ; he conquered the