I was only struck at first with one thing—­and I made a memorandum of it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English obsequiousness to employers—­the degree to which the poor author was overpowered with the honor of his publisher’s visit!  I remember saying to myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair: 

“My good fellow, if you were in America with that fine face and your ready quill, you would have no need to be condescended to by a publisher.”

Dickens was dressed very much as he has since described Dick Swiveller, minus the swell look.  His hair was cropped close to his head, his clothes scant, though jauntily cut, and, after changing a ragged office-coat for a shabby blue, he stood by the door, collarless and buttoned up, the very personification of a close sailer to the wind.

Before this interview with Willis, which Dickens always repudiated, he had become something of a celebrity among the newspaper men with whom he worked as a stenographer.  As every one knows, he had had a hard time in his early years, working in a blacking-shop, and feeling too keenly the ignominious position of which a less sensitive boy would probably have thought nothing.  Then he became a shorthand reporter, and was busy at his work, so that he had little time for amusements.

It has been generally supposed that no love-affair entered his life until he met Catherine Hogarth, whom he married soon after making her acquaintance.  People who are eager at ferreting out unimportant facts about important men had unanimously come to the conclusion that up to the age of twenty Dickens was entirely fancy-free.  It was left to an American to disclose the fact that this was not the case, but that even in his teens he had been captivated by a girl of about his own age.

Inasmuch as the only reproach that was ever made against Dickens was based upon his love-affairs, let us go back and trace them from this early one to the very last, which must yet for some years, at least, remain a mystery.

Everything that is known about his first affair is contained in a book very beautifully printed, but inaccessible to most readers.  Some years ago Mr. William K. Bixby, of St. Louis, found in London a collector of curios.  This man had in his stock a number of letters which had passed between a Miss Maria Beadnell and Charles Dickens when the two were about nineteen and a second package of letters representing a later acquaintance, about 1855, at which time Miss Beadnell had been married for a long time to a Mr. Henry Louis Winter, of 12 Artillery Place, London.

The copyright laws of Great Britain would not allow Mr. Bixby to publish the letters in that country, and he did not care to give them to the public here.  Therefore, he presented them to the Bibliophile Society, with the understanding that four hundred and ninety-three copies, with the Bibliophile book-plate, were to be printed and distributed among the members of the society.  A few additional copies were struck off, but these did not bear the Bibliophile book-plate.  Only two copies are available for other readers, and to peruse these it is necessary to visit the Congressional Library in Washington, where they were placed on July 24, 1908.