most beautiful pictures of childhood in existence.  In what sunshine of love does the lad bask with his mother and Peggotty, till Mrs. Copperfield contracts her disastrous second marriage with Mr. Murdstone!  Then how the scene changes.  There come harshness and cruelty; banishment to Mr. Creakle’s villainous school; the poor mother’s death; the worse banishment to London, and descent into warehouse drudgery; the strange shabby-genteel, happy-go-lucky life with the Micawbers; the flight from intolerable ills in the forlorn hope that David’s aunt will take pity on him.  Here the scene changes again.  Miss Betsy Trotwood, a fine old gnarled piece of womanhood, places the boy at school at Canterbury, where he makes acquaintance with Agnes, the woman whom he marries far, far on in the story; and with her father, Mr. Wickham, a somewhat port wine-loving lawyer; and with Uriah Heep, the fawning villain of the piece.  How David is first articled to a proctor in Doctors’ Commons, and then becomes a reporter, and then a successful author; and how he marries his first wife, the childish Dora, who dies; and how, meanwhile, Uriah is effecting the general ruin, and aspiring to the hand of Agnes, till his villanies are detected and his machinations defeated by Micawber—­how all this comes about, would be a long story to tell.  But, as is usual with Dickens, there are subsidiary rills of story running into the main stream, and by one of these I should like to linger a moment.  The head-boy, and a kind of parlour-boarder, at Mr. Creakles’ establishment, is one Steerforth, the spoilt only son of a widow.  This Steerforth, David meets again when both are young men, and they go down together to Yarmouth, and there David is the means of making him known to a family of fisherfolk.  He is rich, handsome, with an indescribable charm, according to his friends’ testimony, and he induces the fisherman’s niece, the pretty Em’ly, to desert her home, and the young boat-builder to whom she is engaged, and to fly to Italy.  Now to this story, as Dickens tells it, French criticism objects that he dwells exclusively on the sin and sorrow, and sets aside that in which the French novelist would delight, viz., the mad force and irresistible sway of passion.  To which English criticism may, I think, reply, that the “pity of it,” the wide-working desolation, are as essentially part of such an event as the passion; and, therefore, even from an exclusively artistic point of view, just as fit subjects for the novelist.

While “David Copperfield” was in progress, Dickens started on a new venture.  He had often before projected a periodical, and twice, as we have seen,—­once in Master Humphrey’s Clock, and again as editor of The Daily News,—­had attempted quasi-journalism or its reality.  But now at last he had struck the right vein.  He had discovered a means of utilizing his popularity, and imparting it to a paper, without being under the crushing necessity of writing the whole of that paper himself.  The first number of Household Words appeared on the 30th of March, 1850.