Page:Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Lang - Volume 3.djvu/16

vi exactly at the same time as the last half of Pickwick, Dickens "not being even by a week in advance of the printer with either."

Different men have different methods. Some could not send a novel to the press for periodical publication before all of it lay before them in manuscript. Others, like Scott and Dickens, have found their powers heightened by the insistence of the press. There is no use in scolding at improvisers, after Mr. Carlyle's manner in his essay on Sir Walter. The merits of care and elaborate diligence, as in the examples of Flaubert, Mr. Stevenson, or Charlotte Brontë, are conspicuous, but Waverley and Oliver Twist are likely to live as long as Madame Bovary, Prince Otto, or Villette. It is vain to lecture to authors, who will find out their own methods. But Dickens must have put a strain even on his vigour, by writing two novels at once, and by editing Mr. Bentley's magazine, while, after Pickwick, new labours under his agreement encroached on the time and energy demanded by Oliver. He worked simultaneously at the anonymous Sketches of Young Gentlemen, the Life of Grimaldi, and a pamphlet on "Sunday, under Three Heads." As if acting on Scott's advice, he struck while the iron was hot, and his labours, being almost entirely imaginative, were more exhausting than Scott's casual reviews and antiquarianisms. Again, the death of Mary Hogarth interrupted Oliver, no less than it interrupted Pickwick, and Dickens was also vexed by tracasseries with publishers and by the sense of bondage to an agreement. Nicholas Nickleby had to be commenced, and a horrid shadow of an inevitable Barndby Rudge was looming up. "He had a sense of something hanging over him like a hideous nightmare," says Mr. Forster. He worked after dinner, and late at night—a nefarious practice. Moreover, Oliver, according