Claus, while his creator is "the last of the mythologists and
perhaps the greatest."

When _The Pickwick Papers_ appeared in book form at the close of 1837
Dickens's popular reputation was made. From the appearance of Sam Weller
in part v. the universal hunger for the monthly parts had risen to a
furore. The book was promptly translated into French and German. The
author had received little assistance from press or critics, he had no
influential connexions, his class of subjects was such as to "expose him
at the outset to the fatal objections of vulgarity," yet in less than
six months from the appearance of the first number, as the _Quarterly
Review_ almost ruefully admits, the whole reading world was talking
about the Pickwickians. The names of Winkle, Wardle, Weller, Jingle,
Snodgrass, Dodson & Fogg, were as familiar as household words. Pickwick
chintzes figured in the linendrapers' windows, and Pickwick cigars in
every tobacconist's; Weller corduroys became the stock-in-trade of every
breeches-maker; Boz cabs might be seen rattling through the streets, and
the portrait of the author of _Pelham_ and _Crichton_ was scraped down
to make way for that of the new popular favourite on the omnibuses. A
new and original genius had suddenly sprung up, there was no denying it,
even though, as the _Quarterly_ concluded, "it required no gift of
prophecy to foretell his fate--he has risen like a rocket and he will
come down like the stick." It would have needed a very emphatic gift of
prophecy indeed to foretell that Dickens's reputation would have gone on
rising until at the present day (after one sharp fall, which reached an
extreme about 1887) it stands higher than it has ever stood before.

Dickens's assumption of the literary purple was as amazing as anything
else about him. Accepting the homage of the luminaries of the literary,
artistic and polite worlds as if it had been his natural due, he
arranges for the settlement of his family, decrees, like another Edmund
Kean, that his son is to go to Eton, carries on the most complicated
negotiations with his publishers and editors, presides and orates with
incomparable force at innumerable banquets, public and private, arranges
elaborate villegiatures in the country, at the seaside, in France or in
Italy, arbitrates in public on every topic, political, ethical,
artistic, social or literary, entertains and legislates for an
increasingly large domestic circle, both juvenile and adul