NOTES ON BOOKS.
F the different biographical works, lately pub-
attract attention; we of course mean Mr.
Forster’s “ Biography of Charles Dickens,”
the first volume of which has just been
issued. Mr. Forster has earned a great reputation, both
as an historian, and as a writer of literary biographies.
His Lives of Oliver Goldsmith and of Landor may be
now said to belong to the classics of the language. The
Life of Dickens will be widely popular, as Charles
Dickens was by far the most popular humourist and
| novelist of his day. Some of his works may be open to
literary criticism, and there may be passages in his
writings which are open to still more serious objections.
On the whole, however, he well deserved his literary

hours, diffused such wide enjoyment, and won for himself
so much of the personal regard and affection of the
people. The particulars which Mr. Forster has now
given of his private life will awaken much sympathy
among his readers for their great favourite. They will
|see that his splendid career was very far from being
unchequered by sorrow and misfortunes. It was through
privations and trials, by energy and the hardest work,
that Dickens was enabled to give free scope to that
remarkable genius with which he was endowed.

| Mr. Forster's biography may almost. be said to give a
|key to very much in the famous series of the Stories by
| Boz. We have the growth of the stories, the clue to
the characters, the circumstances and history that belonged
to each tale. We are able to see how Dickens drew on
j all his surroundings, studied all the people with whom
lhe came in contact, and drew most of all upon his
|own history and experience. Many chapters of his
j novels are simply transcripts of his own life. He took
story-telling as his one business, and energetically adhered
to it. The pains he took were immense, weighing every
word he used, and his industry often approached to the
hardest drudgery. He was an excellent business-man,
and after some initial trouble with publishers, was able
to reap the full fruits of his genius and labour. He
threw himself into his work with terrible earnestness.
| His characters were as his own flesh and blood, and his
ideal sorrows, in the fortunes of his creations, were
hardly less poignant than his griefs in real life.

Tt is curious and interesting to mark the steps by
which he obtained opulence and fame. Never had so
successful a life such an unprosperous early time. The
child’s earliest experiences were those of the pawnbroker’s
shop, the pot-house, the prison, and the blacking manu-
factory. Those circumstances doubtless gave him a deep
insight into the ways of suffering poverty, and enabled
him to understand the humblest varieties of London life.
But the deep shame and humiliation attending them,
caused by his father’s embarrassed affairs, haunted all his
future days. In mature successful life, he would awake
with horror, thinking of that old unhappy time; and
could not pass certain streets without the tears coming
to his eyes. He has given the narrative of his early
life in “ David Copperfield.” It is interesting to know
that he had intended to write his own life, but his
“ Memoirs” subsequently took the form of this interest-
ing and, to a great degree, autobiographical story. After

NOTES ON BOOKS.

lished, there is one that will pre-eminently |

supremacy, during which he cheered so many languid |

125

_ his boyish days, he became a shorthand reporter, passing
through various grades until he became the best of par-
liamentary reporters. He always did his work thoroughly
and well. He has himself told how, asa reporter, he
would have to gallop at dead of night through a wild
country, in a post-chaise and four, writing his notes on
the palm of his hand, sometimes belated on a miry road,
with a wheelless carriage and exhausted horses. He
first became known as an author by a collection of mis-
cellaneous papers, entitled “Sketches by Boz,” which he
sold for a hundred and fifty pounds, and was afterwards
glad to get back his copyright by paying more than two
thousand for it. In 1836, he commenced “ Pickwick,”
which suddenly brought him into fame and fortune. Of
one of the earlier numbers an impression of only 400 was
ordered; in a later number the impression ordered was
40,000.

We are told of his marriage, and of the successive
births of his children, of his rapid series of books, and
their uniform wonderful success. He began now to
move about the world. The latter part of Mr. Forster’s
volume is mainly occupied by the account of his travels
in Scotland and in America. Wherever he went he was
greeted with popular ovations, and on all these trying
oceasions, he bore himself with becoming modesty and
reticence. He has given an account of his visit, in his
© American Notes,” but this does not supersede the interest
of the vivid and remarkable letters which he addresses to
Mr. Forster. A comparison between the book and the
letters, is extremely interesting. And though he never
wrote, or intended to write, any book about his second
visit, we have no doubt that we shall find another interest-
ing comparison, when we come to read his letters during
that American visit which happened not long before his
death. The Americans received him very generously,
and in spite of the strictures in the “Notes,” and
“Martin Chuzzlewit,” renewed their vehement welcome a
generation later. Mr. Dickens found some of the incon-
yeniences of popularity. ‘I can do nothing that I want
to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing
that I want to see. If I turn into the street I am
followed by a multitude. IfI stay at home, the house
becomes, with callers, like a fair. If I visit a public
institution with only one friend, the directors come down
incontinently, waylay me in the yard, and address me in
along speech. I go to a party in the evening, and am
so enclosed and hemmed about with people, stand where
I will, that Tam exhausted for want of air. I dine ont,
and have to talk about every thing to every body. I go to
church for quiet, and there is a violent rush to the
neighbourhood of the pew I sit in. Itake my seat in a
yailroad-car, and the very conductor won't leave me
alone. I get out at a station, and can’t drink a glass of
water without having a hundred people looking down my
throat, when I open my mouth to swallow. Conceive
what all this is! Then by every post, letters on letters
arrive, all about nothing, and all demanding an immediate
answer.’ The fact is that Dickens was then a young
man, and his sense of the ridiculous, and proneness to
caricature, probably caused him to do some injustice to
his transatlantic hosts. The effect of his travels was,
no doubt, highly beneficial to him. When his father
was asked where his son had been educated, he replied
very fairly, that he had educated himself. It was
a peculiar and special, and in some ways a painful educa-