ut even Forster--we may assume through
tact--has not set down all that he could, although he gives a clue.

As is well known, Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth when he
was only twenty-four. He had just published his Sketches by Boz, the
copyright of which he sold for one hundred pounds, and was beginning the
Pickwick Papers. About this time his publisher brought N. P. Willis
down to Furnival's Inn to see the man whom Willis called "a young
paragraphist for the Morning Chronicle." Willis thus sketches Dickens
and his surroundings:

In the most crowded part of Holborn, within a door or two of the Bull
and Mouth Inn, we pulled up at the entrance of a large building used
for lawyers' chambers. I followed by a long flight of stairs to an upper
story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with
a deal table, two or three chairs and a few books, a small boy and Mr.
Dickens for the contents.

I was only struck at first with one thing--and I made a memorandum of
it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English
obsequiousness to employers--the degree to which the poor author was
overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit! I remember saying
to myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair:

"My good fellow, if you were in America with that fine face and
your ready quill, you would have no need to be condescended to by a
publisher."

Dickens was dressed very much as he has since described Dick Swiveller,
minus the swell look. His hair was cropped close to his head, his
clothes scant, though jauntily cut, and, after changing a ragged
office-coat for a shabby blue, he stood by the door, collarless and
buttoned up, the very personification of a close sailer to the wind.

Before this interview with Willis, which Dickens always repudiated, he
had become something of a celebrity among the newspaper men with whom he
worked as a stenographer. As every one knows, he had had a hard time in
his early years, working in a blacking-shop, and feeling too keenly the
ignominious position of which a less sensitive boy would probably have
thought nothing. Then he became a shorthand reporter, and was busy at
his work, so that he had little time for amusements.

It has been generally supposed that no love-affair entered his life
until he met Catherine Hogarth, whom he married soon after making her
acquaintance. People who are eager at ferreting out unimportant facts
about important men had unanimously