fore November
1837 had ended, Charles Dickens entered on an engagement to write a
successor to _Pickwick_ on similar lines of publication. _Oliver Twist_
was then in mid-career; a _Life of Grimaldi_ and _Barnaby Rudge_ were
already covenanted for. Dickens forged ahead with the new tale of
_Nicholas Nickleby_ and was justified by the results, for its sale far
surpassed even that of _Pickwick_. As a conception it is one of his
weakest. An unmistakably 18th-century character pervades it. Some of the
vignettes are among the most piquant and besetting ever written. Large
parts of it are totally unobserved conventional melodrama; but the
Portsmouth Theatre and Dotheboys Hall and Mrs Nickleby (based to some
extent, it is thought, upon Miss Bates in _Emma_, but also upon the
author's Mamma) live for ever as Dickens conceived them in the pages of
_Nicholas Nickleby_.

Having got rid of _Nicholas Nickleby_ and resigned his editorship of
_Bentley's Miscellany_, in which _Oliver Twist_ originally appeared,
Dickens conceived the idea of a weekly periodical to be issued as
_Master Humphrey's Clock_, to comprise short stories, essays and
miscellaneous papers, after the model of Addison's _Spectator_. To make
the weekly numbers "go," he introduced Mr Pickwick, Sam Weller and his
father in friendly intercourse. But the public requisitioned "a story,"
and in No. 4 he had to brace himself up to give them one. Thus was
commenced _The Old Curiosity Shop_, which was continued with slight
interruptions, and followed by _Barnaby Rudge_. For the first time we
find Dickens obsessed by a highly complicated plot. The tonality
achieved in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ surpassed anything he had attempted
in this difficult vein, while the rich humour of Dick Swiveller and the
Marchioness, and the vivid portraiture of the wandering Bohemians,
attain the very highest level of Dickensian drollery; but in the
lamentable tale of Little Nell (though Landor and Jeffrey thought the
character-drawing of this infant comparable with that of Cordelia), it
is generally admitted that he committed an indecent assault upon the
emotions by exhibiting a veritable monster of piety and long-suffering
in a child of tender years. In _Barnaby Rudge_ he was manifestly
affected by the influence of Scott, whose achievements he always
regarded with a touching veneration. The plot, again, is of the utmost
complexity, and Edgar Allan Poe (who predicted the conclusion) must be
one of