ickens's
words, a most ignorant fellow and a tyrant. He learned little at this
place, being interested chiefly in stories, and in acting out the heroic
parts which appealed to his imagination; but again his personal experience
was of immense value, and resulted in his famous picture of Dotheboys Hall,
in _Nicholas Nickleby_, which helped largely to mitigate the evils of
private schools in England. Wherever he went, Dickens was a marvelously
keen observer, with an active imagination which made stories out of
incidents and characters that ordinary men would have hardly noticed.
Moreover he was a born actor, and was at one time the leading spirit of a
band of amateurs who gave entertainments for charity all over England.
These three things, his keen observation, his active imagination, and the
actor's spirit which animated him, furnish a key to his life and writings.

When only fifteen years old, he left the school and again went to work,
this time as clerk in a lawyer's office. By night he studied shorthand, in
order to fit himself to be a reporter,--this in imitation of his father,
who was now engaged by a newspaper to report the speeches in Parliament.
Everything that Dickens attempted seems to have been done with vigor and
intensity, and within two years we find him reporting important speeches,
and writing out his notes as the heavy coach lurched and rolled through the
mud of country roads on its dark way to London town. It was largely during
this period that he gained his extraordinary knowledge of inns and stables
and "horsey" persons, which is reflected in his novels. He also grew
ambitious, and began to write on his own account. At the age of twenty-one
he dropped his first little sketch "stealthily, with fear and trembling,
into a dark letter-box, in a dark office up a dark court in Fleet Street."
The name of this first sketch was "Mr. Minns and his Cousin," and it
appeared with other stories in his first book, _Sketches by Boz_, in 1835.
One who reads these sketches now, with their intimate knowledge of the
hidden life of London, can understand Dickens's first newspaper success
perfectly. His best known work, _Pickwick_, was published serially in
1836-1837, and Dickens's fame and fortune were made. Never before had a
novel appeared so full of vitality and merriment. Though crude in design, a
mere jumble of exaggerated characters and incidents, it fairly bubbled over
with the kind of humor in which the British publ