ne 1870, he was a newspaper editor--first of
_Household Words_, then of _All the Year Round_; but these very
periodicals were of his own making and design. He made two journeys to
America: one very early in 1842, with a literary result (_American
Notes_) of very sharp criticism of its people; the other late in 1867,
when he made large sums by reading from his works--a style of
entertainment which, again, was almost of his own invention, and which
gave employment to a very strong dramatic and histrionic faculty that
found little other vent. But his life was extremely uneventful, being
for its last two and thirty years simply one long spell of hard though
lavishly rewarded literary labour.

The brilliancy and the originality of the product of this can never be
denied. True to his general character of independence, Dickens owes
hardly anything to any predecessor except Smollett, to whom his debts
are rather large, and perhaps to Theodore Hook, to whom, although the
fact has not been generally recognised, they exist. He had had no
regular education, had read as a boy little but the old novelists, and
never became as a man one of either wide learning or much strictly
literary taste. His temperament indeed was of that insubordinate
middle-class variety which rather resents the supremacy of any classics;
and he carried the same feeling into art, into politics, and into the
discussion of the vague problems of social existence which have so much
occupied the last three-quarters of the century. Had this iconoclastic
but ignorant zeal of his (which showed itself in his second novel,
_Nicholas Nickleby_, and was apparent in his last completed one, _Our
Mutual Friend_) been united with less original genius, the result must
have been infinitely tedious, and could not have been in any way
profitable. For Dickens' knowledge, as has been said, was very limited;
his logical faculties were not strong; and while constantly attempting
to satirise the upper classes, he knew extremely little about them, and
has never drawn a single "aristocrat," high government official, or
"big-wig" generally, who presents the remotest resemblance to a living
being. But he knew the lower and lower middle classes of his own day
with wonderful accuracy; he could inform this knowledge of his with that
indefinable comprehension of man as man which has been so often noted;
and over and above this he possessed an imagination, now humorous, now
terrible, now simply