Shop,” and “Barnaby Rudge,” were produced, and in turn were succeeded by a series of great novels representing the writer’s young prime,—­I mean “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Dombey and Son” and “David Copperfield,”—­it was plain that the hand of Dickens was becoming subdued to the element it worked in.  Not only was there a good fable, as before, but it was managed with increasing mastery, while the general adumbration of life gained in solidity, truth and rich human quality.  In brief, by the time “Copperfield,” the story most often referred to as his best work, was reached, Dickens was an artist.  He wrought in that fiction in such a fashion as to make the most of the particular class of Novel it represented:  to wit, the first-person autobiographic picture of life.  Given its purpose, it could hardly have been better done.  It surely bears favorable comparison, for architecture, with Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” a work in the same genre, though lacking the autobiographic method.  This is quite aside from its remarkable range of character-portrayal, its humor, pathos and vraisemblance, its feeling for situation, its sonorous eloquence in massed effects.

By the time he had reached mid-career, then, Charles Dickens had made himself a skilled, resourceful story-teller, while his unique qualities of visualization and interpretation had strengthened.  This point is worth emphasis, since there are those who contend that “The Pickwick Papers” is his most characteristic performance.  Such a judgment is absurd, It overlooks the grave beauty of the picture of Chesney Wold in Bleak House; the splendid harmony of the Yarmouth storm in “Copperfield”; the fine melodrama of the chapter in “Chuzzlewit” where the guilty Jonas takes his haggard life; the magnificent portraiture of the Father of the Marshalsea in “Little Dorrit”:  the spiritual exaltation in vivid stage terms of Carton’s death; the exquisite April-day blend of tenderness and fun in limning the young life of a Marchioness, a little Dombey and a tiny Tim.  To call Dickens a comic writer and stop there, is to try to pour a river into a pint pot; for a sort of ebullient boy-like spirit of fun, the high jinks of literature, we go to “Pickwick”; for the light and shade of life to “Copperfield”; for the structural excellencies of fiction to later masterpieces like “The Tale of Two Cities” and “Great Expectations.”

Just here a serious objection often brought against Dickens may be considered:  his alleged tendency to caricature.  Does Dickens make his characters other than what life itself shows, and if so, is he wrong in so doing?

His severest critics assume the second if the first be but granted.  Life—­meaning the exact reproduction of reality—­is their fetish.  Now, it must be granted that Dickens does make his creatures talk as their prototypes do not in life.  Nobody would for a moment assert that Mrs. Gamp, Pecksniff and Micawber could be literally duplicated from the actual world.  But is not Dickens within his rights