"It is to celebrate (that is too great a word, but I can think of no better) the conclusion of my 'Pickwick' labours; and so I intend, before you take that roll upon the grass you spoke of, to beg your acceptance of one of the first complete copies of the work. I shall be much delighted if you would join us."
Of "Nicholas Nickleby," written in 1838-39, Sydney Smith, one of its many detractors, finally succumbed and admitted: "'Nickleby' is very good—I held out against Dickens as long as I could, but he has conquered me."
Shortly after the "Pickwick" dinner, and after the death of his wife's sister Mary, who lived with them, Dickens, his wife, and "Phiz,"—Hablôt K. Browne,—the illustrator of "Pickwick," journeyed together abroad for a brief time. On his return, Dickens first made acquaintance with the seaside village of Broadstairs, where his memory still lives, preserved by an ungainly structure yclept "Bleak House."
CHARLES DICKENS, HIS WIFE, AND SISTER GEORGINA.
From a pencil drawing by D. Maclise.
It may be permissible here to make further mention of Broadstairs. The town itself formed the subject of a paper which he wrote for Household Words in 1851, while as to the structure known as "Bleak House," it formed, as beforesaid, his residence for a short time in 1843.
Writing to an American friend, Professor Felton, at that time, he said:
"In a bay-window in a 'one pair' sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. His name is Boz.... He is brown as a berry, and they do say is a small fortune to the innkeeper who sells beer and cold punch...."
Altogether a unique and impressive pen-portrait, and being from the hand of one who knew his sitter, should be considered a truthful one.
In 1843 Maclise made that remarkable and winsome pencil sketch of Dickens, his wife, and her sister Georgina, one of those fleeting impressions which, for depicting character and sentiment, is worth square yards of conventional portraiture, and which is reproduced here out of sheer admiration for its beauty and power as a record intime. It has been rather coarsely referred to in the past as Maclise's sketch of "Dickens and his pair of petticoats," but we let that pass by virtue of its own sweeping condemnation,—of its being anything more than a charming and intimate record of a fleeting period in the novelist's life, too soon to go—never to return.