In 1842, while still a young man, Dickens was invited to visit the United States and Canada, where his works were even better known than in England, and where he was received as the guest of the nation and treated with every mark of honor and appreciation.  At this time America was, to most Europeans, a kind of huge fairyland, where money sprang out of the earth, and life was happy as a long holiday.  Dickens evidently shared this rosy view, and his romantic expectations were naturally disappointed.  The crude, unfinished look of the big country seems to have roused a strong prejudice in his mind, which was not overcome at the time of his second visit, twenty-five years later, and which brought forth the harsh criticism of his American Notes (1842) and of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844).  These two unkind books struck a false note, and Dickens began to lose something of his great popularity.  In addition he had spent money beyond his income.  His domestic life, which had been at first very happy, became more and more irritating, until he separated from his wife in 1858.  To get inspiration, which seemed for a time to have failed, he journeyed to Italy, but was disappointed.  Then he turned back to the London streets, and in the five years from 1848 to 1853 appeared Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and Bleak House,—­three remarkable novels, which indicate that he had rediscovered his own power and genius.  Later he resumed the public readings, with their public triumph and applause, which soon came to be a necessity to one who craved popularity as a hungry man craves bread.  These excitements exhausted Dickens, physically and spiritually, and death was the inevitable result.  He died in 1870, over his unfinished Edwin Drood, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

DICKENS’S WORK IN VIEW OF HIS LIFE.  A glance through even this unsatisfactory biography gives us certain illuminating suggestions in regard to all of Dickens’s work.  First, as a child, poor and lonely, longing for love and for society, he laid the foundation for those heartrending pictures of children, which have moved so many readers to unaccustomed tears.  Second, as clerk in a lawyer’s office and in the courts, he gained his knowledge of an entirely different side of human life.  Here he learned to understand both the enemies and the victims of society, between whom the harsh laws of that day frequently made no distinction.  Third, as a reporter, and afterwards as manager of various newspapers, he learned the trick of racy writing, and of knowing to a nicety what would suit the popular taste.  Fourth, as an actor, always an actor in spirit, he seized upon every dramatic possibility, every tense situation, every peculiarity of voice and gesture in the people whom he met, and reproduced these things in his novels, exaggerating them in the way that most pleased his audience.