New paragraphs are marked by beginning the line about an inch from the left-hand margin.
A very marked peculiarity noticeable in many letters is that the left-hand margin gradually grows wider as the lines approach the bottom of the page. The narrowing is wondrously regular, a line drawn from the first letter on the first line to the corresponding position on the last will touch nearly every other line. This peculiarity appears to have escaped every forger whose work we have examined.
If the signs relied upon by the readers of character in handwriting are to be accepted, self-esteem was a pronounced characteristic of the great novelist. His writing abounds with those subtle symptoms of the prevalence of that weakness.
His signature is perhaps the best known of any with which the British public are familiar. It is remarkably uniform, and remained precisely the same from the time he adopted it after the Pickwick period until his death. That which he used in youth was less striking, but none the less self-conscious.
After the Pickwick period Dickens adopted the use of blue paper and blue ink. Letters in black ink, if undated, may safely be attributed to the earlier period.
His note paper was in later years of the regulation note size. The address, Gads' Hill Place, Higham by Rochester, Kent, was in embossed black old English letter. His paper was hand-made, and of good quality. The envelopes were blue, of the same quality paper, but without crest, monogram or distinctive mark. Dickens' vanity expressed itself in the habit of franking envelopes, i.e., by writing his name in the left-hand bottom corner, after the fashion in vogue when Peers and M.P.'s enjoyed the privilege of free postage.
His letters of the pre-envelope period—before 1842—were on quarto sheets. These are exceedingly rare.
There is one feature about autographic forgery which may always be relied upon to assist greatly in the work of detection. As a general rule there is sufficient matter in a literary forgery to supply the necessary material for comparison. It must of necessity be a copy, if not of an existing original, at least of the general style. The process of imitation must be slow and cautious, and the signs remain in shaky, broken lines, and a ruggedness entirely absent from the writing of the real author, which is fluent and free. Even the shakiness of age noticeable in a few distinguished handwritings is different to the shakiness of the forger's uncertainty.