stence about the Dickens characters. Not only did they
exist before we heard of them, they existed also before Dickens heard of
them. As a rule this unchangeable air in Dickens deprives any discussion
about date of its point. But as I have said, this is the one Dickens
work of which the date _is_ essential. It is really an important part of
the criticism of this book to say that it is his first book. Certain
elements of clumsiness, of obviousness, of evident blunder, actually
require the chronological explanation. It is biographically important
that this is his first book, almost exactly in the same way that it is
biographically important that _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ was his last
book. Change or no change, _Edwin Drood_ has this plain point of a last
story about it: that it is not finished. But if the last book is
unfinished, the first book is more unfinished still.

The _Sketches_ divide themselves, of course, into two broad classes. One
half consists of sketches that are truly and in the strict sense
sketches. That is, they are things that have no story and in their
outline none of the character of creation; they are merely facts from
the street or the tavern or the town hall, noted down as they occurred
by an intelligence of quite exceptional vivacity. The second class
consists of purely creative things: farces, romances, stories in any
case with a non-natural perfection, or a poetical justice, to round them
off. One class is admirably represented, for instance, by the sketch
describing the Charity Dinner, the other by such a story as that of
_Horatio Sparkins_. These things were almost certainly written by
Dickens at very various periods of his youth; and early as the harvest
is, no doubt it is a harvest and had ripened during a reasonably long
time. Nevertheless it is with these two types of narrative that the
young Charles Dickens first enters English literature; he enters it with
a number of journalistic notes of such things as he has seen happen in
streets or offices, and with a number of short stories which err on the
side of the extravagant and even the superficial. Journalism had not
then, indeed, sunk to the low level which it has since reached. His
sketches of dirty London would not have been dirty enough for the modern
Imperialist press. Still these first efforts of his are journalism, and
sometimes vulgar journalism. It was as a journalist that he attacked the
world, as a journalist that he conquered