root no more until I return to it....  Did I tell you how many fountains we have here?  No matter.  If they played nectar, they wouldn’t please me half so well as the West Middlesex Waterworks at Devonshire Terrace....  Put me down on Waterloo Bridge at eight o’clock in the evening, with leave to roam about as long as I like, and I would come home, as you know, panting to go on.  I am sadly strange as it is, and can’t settle.”  “Eight o’clock in the evening,”—­that points to another of his peculiarities.  As he liked best to walk in London, so he liked best to walk at night.  The darkness of the great city had a strange fascination for him.  He never grew tired of it, would find pleasure and refreshment, when most weary and jaded, in losing himself in it, in abandoning himself to its mysteries.  Looked at with this knowledge, the opening of the “Old Curiosity Shop” becomes a passage of autobiography.  And how all these wanderings must have served him in his art!  Remember what a keen observer he was, perhaps one of the keenest that ever lived, and then think what food for observation he would thus be constantly collecting.  To the eye that knows how to see, there is no stage where so many scenes from the drama of life are being always enacted as the streets of London.  Dickens frequented that theatre very assiduously, and of his power of sight there can be no question.

FOOTNOTES: 

[13] I think critics, and perhaps I myself, have been a little hard on this Quarterly Reviewer.  He did not, after all, say that Dickens would come down like a stick, only that he might do so if he wrote too fast and furiously.

CHAPTER V.

“Pickwick” had been a novel without any plot.  The story, if story it can be called, bore every trace of its hasty origin.  Scene succeeded scene, and incident incident, and Mr. Pickwick and his three friends were hurried about from place to place, and through adventures of all kinds, without any particularly defined purpose.  In truth, many people, and myself among the number, find some difficulty in reading the book as a connected narrative, and prefer to take it piecemeal.  But in “Oliver Twist” there is a serious effort to work out a coherent plot, and real unity of conception.  Whether that conception be based on probability, is another point.  Oliver is the illegitimate son of a young lady who has lapsed from virtue under circumstances of great temptation, but still lapsed from virtue, and who dies in giving him birth.  He is brought up as a pauper child in a particularly ill-managed workhouse, and apprenticed to a low undertaker.  Thence he escapes, and walks to London, where he falls in with a gang of thieves.  His legitimate brother, an unutterable scoundrel, happens to see him in London, and recognizing him by a likeness to their common father, bribes the thieves to recapture him when he has escaped from their clutches.  Now I would