Sketches by Boz, in two volumes, 1835-36. To these presently followed The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, which were completed at the close of 1837. As the numbers of this incomparable work appeared, Dickens advanced from comparative obscurity to a place of the highest popularity and fame. Oliver Twist immediately followed, and was completed in 1838; before it closed the serial publication of Nicholas Nickleby had commenced, and went on until 1839. He was by this time familiar with the attractions of Broadstairs, which continued to be his favourite holiday retreat for the greater part of his life. His reputation was steadily growing, and at eight-and-twenty he was unquestionably the most popular of living English writers. Master Humphrey's Clock occupied Dickens from early in 1840 to late in 1841; this was an illustrated weekly journal, in which appeared Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. This mode of publication, however, was not approved of, and the Clock stopped. In 1841, still under thirty years of age, Dickens was welcomed with public honours in Edinburgh, and was presented with the freedom of that city. Already, in the autumn of that year, the ceaseless activity and excitement of his life began to tell upon him, and he was laid up with severe illness. This, however, did not prevent him from accepting an invitation to the United States, where and in Canada he spent between four and five months. He was received with great enthusiasm as "the Guest of the Nation," but he took a very strong dislike to America, and determined to express his sense of her shortcomings. His American Notes of 1842, and still more the trans-Atlantic scenes of Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844, gave full evidence of his disapproval, and were received in America with pain and anger. It was on his return to England that Dickens gave himself up to that somewhat extravagant cult of Christmas and its traditional jollity, which he actually contrived to impress upon the national manners. The earliest instalment of this section of his writings was A Christmas Carol (1843); this was followed by The Chimes in 1844, and The Cricket on the Hearth, the most successful of the series, in 1845. He excited himself extremely over these compositions, laughing and weeping as he wrote, and the whole conception, to its finish in The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848), had a touch of hysterical sentiment about it. These Christmas books, however, were amazingly popular, and made their author more than ever the darling of

the English public. During these years Dickens was much in the south of Europe, from which he sent his Pictures from Italy in 1846. Early in that year he started and was for a fortnight editor of the Daily News; he very soon found that daily journalism was not the work for him. He left England as soon as he could, and settled at Lausanne; by February 1847 he was back in London. His history now became the

chronicle of his successive novels. Dombey and Son belongs to 1848, David Copperfield to 1850, and Bleak House to 1853. These were the years when his genius was in its most abundant harvest, and he was not merely producing these long and elaborate romances, but from 1850 onwards he was engaged in in editing his weekly periodical, Household Words, and "a-exciting himself dreadful" over the dramatic performances of a company of amateurs, of which he was the manager. The summer he generally spent abroad, after 1853 generally at Boulogne. In 1854 perhaps the earliest flagging of his extraordinary powers was to be observed in the novel of Hard Times, a didactic satire on the principles of the Manchester school. He now began to give public readings from his works, and he found this exercise both pleasurably exciting and to a superlative degree advantageous to his pocket. Little Dorrit, in 1857, further emphasised the fact, already beginning to be patent, that Dickens was making an excessive drain upon his vital powers. He felt the necessity of rest and retirement, and in 1860 he settled at Gadshill Place, a house which he had always longed to possess, and which he had bought in 1856. His next novel-after A Tale of Two Cities (1859)-was Great Expectations (1861), a brilliant book, which showed in several respects the beneficial results of comparative repose and change of scene. From this time forth Dickens had frequent warnings, unfortunately too carelessly attended to, of the ravages