s his best work, was reached, Dickens
was an artist. He wrought in that fiction in such a fashion as
to make the most of the particular class of Novel it
represented: to wit, the first-person autobiographic picture of
life. Given its purpose, it could hardly have been better done.
It surely bears favorable comparison, for architecture, with
Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," a work in the same genre, though
lacking the autobiographic method. This is quite aside from its
remarkable range of character-portrayal, its humor, pathos and
vraisemblance, its feeling for situation, its sonorous eloquence
in massed effects.

By the time he had reached mid-career, then, Charles Dickens had
made himself a skilled, resourceful story-teller, while his
unique qualities of visualization and interpretation had
strengthened. This point is worth emphasis, since there are
those who contend that "The Pickwick Papers" is his most
characteristic performance. Such a judgment is absurd, It
overlooks the grave beauty of the picture of Chesney Wold in
Bleak House; the splendid harmony of the Yarmouth storm in
"Copperfield"; the fine melodrama of the chapter in "Chuzzlewit"
where the guilty Jonas takes his haggard life; the magnificent
portraiture of the Father of the Marshalsea in "Little Dorrit":
the spiritual exaltation in vivid stage terms of Carton's death;
the exquisite April-day blend of tenderness and fun in limning
the young life of a Marchioness, a little Dombey and a tiny Tim.
To call Dickens a comic writer and stop there, is to try to pour
a river into a pint pot; for a sort of ebullient boy-like spirit
of fun, the high jinks of literature, we go to "Pickwick"; for
the light and shade of life to "Copperfield"; for the structural
excellencies of fiction to later masterpieces like "The Tale of
Two Cities" and "Great Expectations."

Just here a serious objection often brought against Dickens may
be considered: his alleged tendency to caricature. Does Dickens
make his characters other than what life itself shows, and if
so, is he wrong in so doing?

His severest critics assume the second if the first be but
granted. Life--meaning the exact reproduction of reality--is
their fetish. Now, it must be granted that Dickens does make his
creatures talk as their prototypes do not in life. Nobody would
for a moment assert that Mrs. Gamp, Pecksniff and Micawber could
be literally duplicated from the actual world. But is not
Dickens within his rights