SOURCE: An introduction to The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces, Etc. by Charles Dickens, Oxford University Press, London, 1958, pp. v-x.

In the following essay. Staples centers on Dickens's use of autobiographical material in The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces.

The genius of Dickens needed space to attain its full stature. Twenty monthly 'parts' of thirty-two pages each were not too much for the telling of his tales. In the preface to the best known of his shorter works he complained of the difficulty of its construction within a 'narrow space'. He remarked that he 'never attempted great elaboration of detail in the working out of character within such limits, believing that it could not succeed'. And yet what memorable characters he did in fact create within the narrowest limits. In the novels one immediately recalls Trabb's boy and, within the narrowest limits imaginable, the nervous young man interposing...