ed.

No article, however short, treating of Charles Dickens, can avoid
entering into the details of his early history with a fulness which
would be out of all proportion to what follows, but for the remarkable
fact that the events of his childhood and his youth impressed his
imagination and influenced the whole of his literary career so
profoundly, that to the very end of his life there is not a single
work in which some of the characters, some of the places, are not
derived from his early recollections. Many other writers there are who
have passed their childish days among the _petites gens_, but none who
have so remembered their ways, their speech, and their mode of
thought. The Marshalsea prison of Little Dorrit is the place where for
two years he went in and out. The Queen's Bench and its Rules were
close to the Marshalsea; Bob Sawyer's lodgings in Lant Street were his
own; David Copperfield, the friendless lad in the dingy warehouse, was
himself; the cathedral of Edwin Drood was that in whose shadow he had
lived; Mrs. Pipehin is his old landlady of Camden Town; the most
delightful features in Mr. Micawber are borrowed from his own father;
the experiences of Doctors' Commons, the solicitor's clerks, the life
in chambers, are all his own; while of individual characters, the list
of those which are known to be portraits more or less true to nature
might be indefinitely extended. And yet, while he was early drawing on
these early recollections, while they constantly furnished him with
scenes and characters, he could not bear to speak of them, and no one
except his friend and biographer, Forster, ever knew that he was
himself, with all the shabby, mean surroundings in early life, exactly
such as David Copperfield.

The rest of Dickens's life has the interest which belongs to success
after success. It was a long, triumphal march. He had no failures; he
suffered no defeats. There were times when his hand was not at his
best, but never a time when his hand lost its power. This indeed seems
the crowning happiness of a successful and singularly happy life, that
when he was cut off--he died June 6, 1870--after fifty-eight years of
continuous work, his brain was still as vigorous, his eye as keen, his
hand as sure as in the first fresh running of his youth. It was indeed
more than literary success which he achieved; he conquered the whole
English-speaking world. This world, which now numbers nigh upon a
hundred millions, lov