ers_ unread, because this novel
contains more spontaneous humor than any other of Dickens' work, and
it is also quoted most frequently. The boy or girl who cannot follow
with relish the amusing incidents in this book is not normal. Older
readers will get more from the book, but it is doubtful whether they
will enjoy its rollicking fun with so keen a zest. Mr. Pickwick, Sam
Weller and his father, Bob Sawyer and the others, how firmly they are
fixed in the mind! What real flesh and blood creatures they are,
despite their creator's exaggeration of special traits and
peculiarities!

[Illustration: ORIGINAL PICKWICK COVER ISSUED IN 1837 WITH
DICKENS' AUTOGRAPH--MOST OF DICKENS' NOVELS WERE ISSUED IN
SHILLING INSTALLMENTS BEFORE BEING PUBLISHED IN THE COMPLETE
VOLUME]

After the _Pickwick Papers_ the choice of the most characteristic of
Dickens' novels is difficult, but my favorites have always been _David
Copperfield_ and _A Tale of Two Cities_, the one the most spontaneous,
the freshest in fancy, the most deeply pathetic of all Dickens' work;
the other absolutely unlike anything he ever wrote, but great in its
intense descriptive passages, which make the horrors of the French
Revolution more real than Carlyle's famous history, and in the sublime
self-sacrifice of Sidney Carton, which Henry Miller, in "The Only
Way," has impressed on thousands of tearful playgoers. That _David
Copperfield_ is not autobiographical we have the positive assertion of
Charles Dickens the younger, yet at the same time every lover of this
book feels that the boyhood of David reproduces memories of the
novelist's childhood and youth, and that from real people and real
scenes are drawn the humble home and the loyal hearts of the
Peggottys, the great self-sacrifice of Ham, the woes of Little Emily
and the tragedy of Steerforth's fate. One misses much who does not
follow the chief actors in this great story, the masterpiece of
Dickens.

Other fine novels, if you have time for them, are _Nicholas Nickleby_,
which broke up the unspeakably cruel boarding schools for boys in
Yorkshire, in one of which poor Smike was done to death; or _Our
Mutual Friend_ which Dickens attacked the English poor laws; or
_Dombey and Son_, that paints the pathos of the child of a rich man
dying for the love which his father was too selfish to give him; or
_Bleak House_, in which the terrible sufferings wrought by the law's
delay in the Court of Chancery are drawn