While in the attorney’s office, Dickens began to study shorthand, in order to become a reporter.  This was the beginning of his success.  His reports were accurate and racy, even when they happened to be written in the pouring rain, in a shaking stagecoach, or by the light of a lantern.  They were also promptly handed in at the office, despite the fact that the stages sometimes broke down and left their passengers to plod on foot through the miry roads leading into London.  These reports and newspaper articles soon attracted attention; and Dickens received an offer for a series of humorous sketches, which grew into the famous Pickwick Papers, and earned L20,000 for the astonished publishers.  He was able to make his own terms for his future novels.  Fame came to him almost at a bound.  He was loved and toasted in England and America before he had reached the age of thirty.  When, late in life, he made lecture tours through his own country, or through Scotland or America, they were like triumphal marches.

In his prime Dickens was an energetic, high-spirited, fun-loving man.  He made a charming host, and was never happier than when engineering theatrical entertainments at his delightful home, Gads Hill.  He was esteemed by all the literary men of London, and idolized by his children and friends.  As his strong personality was communicated to his audiences and his readers, his death in 1870 was felt as a personal loss throughout the English-speaking world.

[Illustration:  DICKENS’S HOME, GADS HILL.]

Works.—­Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Dickens’s first long story, is one of his best.  Mr. Pickwick, with his genial nature, his simple philosophy, and his droll adventures, and Sam Weller, with his ready wit, his acute observations, and his almost limitless resources, are amusing from start to finish.  The book is brimful of its author’s high spirits.  It has no closely knit plot, but merely a succession of comical incidents, and vivid caricatures of Mr. Pickwick and his friends.  Yet the fun is so good-natured and infectious, and the looseness of design is so frankly declared that the book possesses a certain unity arising from its general atmosphere of frolic and jollity.

Oliver Twist (1837-1838) is a powerful story, differing widely from Pickwick Papers.  While the earlier work is delightful chiefly for its humor, Oliver Twist is strong in its pictures of passion and crime.  Bill Sykes the murderer, Fagin the Jew, who teaches the boys deftness of hand in stealing, and poor Nancy, are drawn with such power that they seem to be still actually living in some of London’s dark alleys.  Little Oliver, born in the poor-house, clothed by charity, taught by the evil genius of the streets, starved in body and soul, is one of the many pathetic portraits of children drawn with a sure and loving hand by Dickens.  There are some improbable features about the plot and some overwrought sentimental scenes in this story.  Dickens reveled in the romantic and found it in robbers’ dens, in bare poverty, in red-handed crime.  The touching pathos and thrilling adventures of Oliver Twist make a strong appeal to the reader’s emotions.