He wrote to a friend one night, "I have at this moment got Pickwick and his friends on the Rochester coach, and they are going on swimmingly, in company with a very different character from any I have yet described" (Alfred Jingle), "who I flatter myself will make a decided hit. I want to get them from the ball to the inn before I go to bed; and I think that will take till one or two o'clock at the earliest. The publishers will be here in the morning, so you will readily suppose I have no alternative but to stick to my desk."
The public was slow in appreciating the humor of the "Pickwick Papers," and the series dragged until Part IV appeared, and with it the character of Sam Weller. This original and very entertaining figure turned the scales, and almost instantly there was the greatest demand for the "Pickwick Papers." By the time the series was finished the name of "Boz" was constantly on almost every English tongue. Here again fortune had had much to do with deciding Dickens' career. Had the series failed, he might have continued merely a reporter, but the humorous figure of Weller tipped the scales in favor of his adopting the profession of novelist.
From that time on one novel after another flowed from Dickens' pen. For many of their most vivid pictures he was indebted to the hard life of his boyhood, and the strange people he had known in the days when he worked in the blacking factory finally grew into some of his greatest characters. The little maid-of-all-work became the Marchioness in the "Old Curiosity Shop," Bob Fagin loaned his name to "Oliver Twist," and in "David Copperfield" we read the story of the small boy who had to fight his way through London alone.
Those days of boyhood had given him a deep insight into human nature, into the humor and pathos of other people's lives, and it was that rare insight that enabled him to become in time one of the greatest of all English writers, Charles Dickens, the beloved novelist of the Anglo-Saxon people.
XXI
Otto von Bismarck
The Boy of Göttingen: 1815-1898
A tall, slender boy, followed by a great Danish hound, walked down the main street of the German town of Göttingen in Hanover one spring morning in 1832. The small round cap, gay with colors, told the world that the boy was a student at the University, and also that he belonged to one of the students' clubs, or fighting corps, as they were called. But this boy looked quite a dandy. A wide sash was tied about his waist, high-polished boots came up to his knees, and he wore a knot of colors on his breast, the same colors he sported in his cap, the emblem that he belonged to the Brunswick student corps. Moreover he carried himself with rather a haughty manner, and the big dog, following at his heels, walked in much the same way.
Presently there came strolling along the street a group of a half dozen boys who wore the round caps of the Hanoverian Club. Something about the boy with the dog struck them as comical, and they began to laugh, and nudge each other, and when they came up to the boy they stopped and stared at him in undisguised amusement. Quick color sprang to his cheeks, he hesitated, and then came to a full stop. It was not pleasant to be singled out as a laughing-stock in the main street of Göttingen.