is also this striking contrast between the
novelist and the poets,--that while the whole tendency of the age was
toward realism, away from the extremes of the romanticists and from the
oddities and absurdities of the early novel writers, it was precisely by
emphasizing oddities and absurdities, by making caricatures rather than
characters, that Dickens first achieved his popularity.

LIFE. In Dickens's early life we see a stern but unrecognized preparation
for the work that he was to do. Never was there a better illustration of
the fact that a boy's early hardship and suffering are sometimes only
divine messengers disguised, and that circumstances which seem only evil
are often the source of a man's strength and of the influence which he is
to wield in the world. He was the second of eight poor children, and was
born at Landport in 1812. His father, who is supposed to be the original of
Mr. Micawber, was a clerk in a navy office. He could never make both ends
meet, and after struggling with debts in his native town for many years,
moved to London when Dickens was nine years old. The debts still pursued
him, and after two years of grandiloquent misfortune he was thrown into the
poor-debtors' prison. His wife, the original of Mrs. Micawber, then set up
the famous Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies; but, in Dickens's
words, no young ladies ever came. The only visitors were creditors, and
they were quite ferocious. In the picture of the Micawber family, with its
tears and smiles and general shiftlessness, we have a suggestion of
Dickens's own family life.

At eleven years of age the boy was taken out of school and went to work in
the cellar of a blacking factory. At this time he was, in his own words, a
"queer small boy," who suffered as he worked; and we can appreciate the boy
and the suffering more when we find both reflected in the character of
David Copperfield. It is a heart-rending picture, this sensitive child
working from dawn till dark for a few pennies, and associating with toughs
and waifs in his brief intervals of labor; but we can see in it the sources
of that intimate knowledge of the hearts of the poor and outcast which was
soon to be reflected in literature and to startle all England by its appeal
for sympathy. A small legacy ended this wretchedness, bringing the father
from the prison and sending the boy to Wellington House Academy,--a
worthless and brutal school, evidently, whose head master was, in D