From a photo by C. Watkins
MRS. CHARLES DICKENS
The Novelist’s widow died in 1879
Dickens had just attained his majority when, in 1833, he essayed to venture into the realm of fiction. He has himself related how, one evening at twilight, he stealthily entered “a dark court” in Fleet Street (it was Johnson’s Court), and with fear and trembling dropped into “a dark letter-box” the manuscript of his first paper—a humorous sketch entitled “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” (afterwards called “Mr. Minns and his Cousin”); and how, when it “appeared in all the glory of print,” he walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because (he explains) his eyes “were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there.” To this initial effort (which was published in the old Monthly Magazine, December, 1833) there is a slight reference in the forty-second chapter of “David Copperfield,” where the youthful hero intimates that he “wrote a little something, in secret, and sent it to a magazine, and it was published in the magazine.” His journeys across country by coach or postchaise, when reporting for his newspaper (the Morning Chronicle), proved invaluable from a literary standpoint, inasmuch as those expeditions by day and night and in all seasons afforded him special opportunities of studying human idiosyncrasies, as he necessarily came into contact with “all sorts and conditions of men.”
From a photo by Walter Dexter
RESTORATION HOUSE (THE “SATIS HOUSE” OF “GREAT EXPECTATIONS”)