have _Martin Chuzzlewit_. But his novels, despite their many faults,
could not be dispensed with,--no one who understands literary value
would give up even the worst of them,--while his earlier "Christmas
Books" (during the fancy for these things in the forties) and his later
contributions to the Christmas numbers of his periodicals contain some
of his best fantastic and pathetic work. _Pickwick_ was immediately
followed by _Oliver Twist_,--a very popular book, and in parts a very
powerful one, but containing in germ most of the faults which afterwards
developed themselves, and, with the exception of the "Artful Dodger,"
not bringing out any of his great character-creations. _Nicholas
Nickleby_ (1838) is a story designed to fix a stigma on cheap private
schools, and marred by some satire as cheap as the schools themselves on
the fashionable and aristocratic society of which to his dying day
Dickens never knew anything; but it is of great interest as a story, and
full of admirable humoristic sketches, which almost if not quite excused
not merely the defect of knowledge just referred to, but the author's
unfortunate proneness to attempt irony, of which he had no command, and
argument, of which he had if possible less. His next two stories, _The
Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_, were enshrined (1840-41) in an
odd framework of fantastic presentation, under the general title of
_Master Humphrey's Clock_,--a form afterwards discarded with some
advantage, but also with some loss. _The Old Curiosity Shop_, strongly
commended to its own public and seriously hampered since by some rather
maudlin pathos, improved even upon _Nicholas Nickleby_ in the humoristic
vein; and while Dick Swiveller, Codlin and Short, Mr. Chuckster, and
others remain as some of the best of Dickens' peculiar characters of the
lighter sort, the dwarf Quilp is perhaps his only thoroughly successful
excursion into the grimmer and more horrible kind of humour. _Barnaby
Rudge_ is in part a historical novel, and the description of the riots
of Eighty is of extraordinary power; but the real appeal of the book
lies in the characters of the Varden family, with the handmaid Miss
Miggs and the ferocious apprentice Tappertit. Sir John Chester, a sort
of study from Chesterfield, is one of the most disastrous of this
author's failures; but Dennis the Hangman may have a place by Quilp.
Then (1843) came _Martin Chuzzlewit_, which, as observed, embodied his
American