In a sense, all Dickens’ qualities are to be found in “The Pickwick Papers,” as they have come to be called for brevity’s sake.  But the assertion is misleading, if it be taken to mean that in the fifteen books of fiction which Dickens was to produce, he added nothing, failed to grow in his art or to widen and deepen in his hold upon life.  So far is this from the truth, that one who only knows Charles Dickens in this first great book of fun, knows a phase of him, not the whole man:  more, hardly knows the novelist at all.  He was to become, and to remain, not only a great humorist, but a great novelist as well:  and “Pickwick” is not, by definition, a Novel at all.  Hence, the next book the following year, “Oliver Twist,” was important as answering the question:  Was the brilliant new writer to turn out very novelist, able to invent, handle and lead to due end a tangled representation of social life?

Before replying, one rather important matter may be adverted to, concerning the Dickens introduced to the world by “Pickwick”:  his astonishing power in the evocation of human beings, whom we affectionately remember, whose words are treasured, whose fates are followed with a sort of sense of personal responsibility.  If the creation of differentiated types of humanity who persist in living in the imagination be the cardinal gift of the fiction writer, then this one is easily the leading novelist of the race.  Putting aside for the moment the question of his caricaturing tendency, one fact confronts us, hardly to be explained away:  we can close our eyes and see Micawber, Mrs. Gamp, Pegotty, Dick Swiveller, the Artful Dodger, Joe Gargery, Tootles, Captain Cutter, and a hundred more, and their sayings, quaint and dear, are like household companions.  And this is true in equal measure of no other story-maker who has used English speech—­it may be doubted if it is true to like degree of Shakspere himself.

In the quick-following stories, “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” the author passed from episode and comic characterization to what were in some sort Novels:  the fiction of organism, growth and climax.

His wealth of character creation was continued and even broadened.  But there was more here:  an attempt to play the game of Novel-making.  It may be granted that when Dickens wrote these early books (as a young man in the twenties), he had not yet mastered many of the difficulties of the art of fiction.  There is loose construction in both:  the melodrama of “Oliver Twist” blends but imperfectly with the serious and sentimental part of the narrative, which is less attractive.  So, too, in “Nickleby,” there is an effect at times of thin ice where the plot is secondary to the episodic scenes and characters by the way.  Yet in both Novels there is a story and a good one:  we get the spectacle of genius learning its lesson,—­experimenting in a form.  And as those other early books, differing totally from each other too, “Old Curiosity