journey to London, “because,” as he writes to Forster, “of that unspeakable restless something which would render it almost as impossible for me to remain here, and not see the thing complete, as it would be for a full balloon, left to itself, not to go up.”  A further reason was to try the effect of the story upon a circle of listeners, to be assembled for the purpose:  “Carlyle, indispensable, and I should like his wife of all things; her judgment would be invaluable.  You will ask Mac, and why not his sister?  Stanny and Jerrold I should particularly wish.  Edwin Landseer, Blanchard perhaps Harness; and what say you to Fonblanque and Fox?” After this it is amusing to read that the book “was not one of his greatest successes, and it raised him up some objectors;” but the reading was the germ of those which afterward brought him into such close relations with his public.

Of another Christmas story he writes, “I dreamed all last week that the Battle of Life was a series of chambers, impossible to be got to rights or got out of, through which I wandered drearily all night.  On Saturday night I don’t think I slept an hour.  I was perpetually roaming through the story, and endeavoring to dovetail the revolution here into the plot.  The mental distress quite horrible.”  Here we have, perhaps, a clear case of the effects of overwork.  But in general the details of his plots, the names of the characters, above all, the titles of the stories, were evolved with an amount of thought and discussion that might have sufficed for the plan and the preparations for a battle.  “Martin Chuzzlewit” is not a name suggestive of long and serious deliberation:  one might rather suppose that it had turned up accidentally and been accepted simply as being as good as another.  Yet it was not adopted till after many others had been discussed and rejected.  “Martin was the prefix to all, but the surname varied from its first form of Sweezleden, Sweezleback and Sweeztewag, to those of Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig and Chuzzlewig.” David Copperfield was preceded by a still longer list of abortions, and Household Words, as a mere title, was the result of a parturition far exceeding in length and severity any throes of travail known to natural history.

All this was unaccompanied by any of the doubts and misgivings, the fits of depression and intervals of lassitude, which are the ordinary tortures of authorship.  Nor had it any connection with the weaknesses of the craft, its small vanities and jealousies.  “It was,” as Mr. Forster well remarks, “part of the intense individuality by which he effected so much to set the high value which in general he did upon what he was striving to accomplish.”  Hence, too, no half-formed and then abandoned projects were among the stepping-stones of his career.  A plan or an idea, once conceived, was certain to be shaped, developed and matured; and whatever the result, it left up disheartening effect, no feeling of distrust, to cripple a subsequent undertaking.