CHARLES DICKENS, 1842 76
From a bust by H. Dexter, executed during Dickens's
first visit to America.

CHARLES DICKENS, 1844 90
From a miniature by Margaret Gillies.

CHARLES DICKENS, 1849 130
From a daguerreotype by Mayall.

CHARLES DICKENS, 1858 184
From a black and white drawing by Baughiet.

CHARLES DICKENS, 1859 188
From an oil painting by W. P. Frith, R.A.

CHARLES DICKENS, CIRCA 1860 198
Photograph by J. & C. Watkins.

CHARLES DICKENS, 1868 218
From a photograph by Gurney.

INTRODUCTION

These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books
of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries of the
classics which are one of the real improvements of recent times. Thus
they were harmless, being diluted by, or rather drowned in Dickens. My
scrap of theory was a mere dry biscuit to be taken with the grand tawny
port of great English comedy; and by most people it was not taken at
all--like the biscuit. Nevertheless the essays were not in intention so
aimless as they appear in fact. I had a general notion of what needed
saying about Dickens to the new generation, though probably I did not
say it. I will make another attempt to do so in this prologue, and,
possibly fail again.

There was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we
watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern
world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin
to realise that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe
of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was
called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed
vulgar--all that is itself breaking up like a cloudland. And only the
caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone. This, of
course, is an old story in the case of a man reproached with any excess
of the poetic. Again and again when the man of visions was pinned by the
sly dog who knows the world,

"The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died."

To call Thackeray a cynic, which means a sly dog, was ind