NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.—­The Pickwick Papers were in their intention a series of sketches somewhat desultory and loosely connected.  His next work was Nicholas Nickleby, a complete story, in which he was entirely successful.  Wonderful in the variety and reality of his characters, his powerful satire was here principally directed against the private boarding-schools in England, where unloved children, exiled and forgotten, were ill fed, scantily clothed, untaught, and beaten.  Do-the-boys’ Hall was his type, and many a school prison under that name was fearfully exposed and scourged.  The people read with wonder and applause; these haunts of cruelty were scrutinized, some of them were suppressed; and since Nicholas Nickleby appeared no such school can live, because Squeers and Smike are on every lip, and punishment awaits the tyrant.

Our scope will not permit a review of his numerous novels.  In Oliver Twist he denounces the parish system in its care of orphans, and throws a Drummond light upon the haunts of crime in London.

The Old Curiosity Shop exposes the mania of gaming, and seems to have been a device for presenting the pathetic pictures of Little Nell and her grandfather, the wonderful and rapid learning of the marchioness, and the uncommon vitality of Mr. Richard Swiveller; and also the compound of will and hideousness in Quilp.

He affected to find in the receptacle of Master Humphrey’s clock, his Barnaby Rudge, a very dramatic picture of the great riot incited by Lord George Gordon in 1780, which, in its gathering, its fury, and its easy dispersion, was not unlike that of Wat Tyler.  Dickens’s delineations are eminently historic, and present a better notion of the period than the general history itself.

AMERICAN NOTES.—­In 1841 Dickens visited America, where he was received by the public with great enthusiasm, and annoyed, as the author of his biography says, by many individuals.  On his return to England, he produced his American Notes for General Circulation.  They were sarcastic, superficial, and depreciatory, and astonished many whose hospitalities he had received.  But, in 1843, he published Martin Chuzzlewit, in which American peculiarities are treated with the broadest caricature.  The Notes might have been forgiven; but the novel excited a great and just anger in America.  His statements were not true; his pictures were not just; his prejudice led him to malign a people who had received him with a foolish hospitality.  He had eaten and drunk at the hands of the men whom he abused, and his character suffered more than that of his intended victims.  In taking a few foibles for his caricature, he had left our merits untold, and had been guilty of the implication that we had none, although he knew that there were as elegant gentlemen, as refined ladies, and as cultivated society in America as the best in England.  But a truce to reproaches; he has been fully forgiven.