The sketches by Boz were well received, but real fame came to Dickens with the Pickwick Papers which he now began to write.  This story came out in monthly parts.  The first few numbers were not very successful, only about four hundred copies being sold, but by the fifteenth number London was ringing with the fame of it, and forty thousand copies were quickly sold.  “Judges on the bench and boys in the street, gravity and folly, the young and the old"* all alike read it and laughed over it.  Dickens above everything is a humorist, and one of the chief features in his humor is caricature, that is exaggerating and distorting one feature or habit or characteristic of a man out of all likeness to nature.  This often makes very good fun, but it takes away from the truth and realness of his characters.  And yet no story-teller perhaps is remembered so little for his stories and so much for his characters.  In Pickwick there is hardly any story, the papers ramble on in unconnected incidents.  No one could tell the story of Pickwick for there is really none to tell; it is a series of scenes which hang together anyhow.  “Pickwick cannot be classed as a novel,” it has been said; “it is merely a great book."**

Forster. *Gissing.

So in spite of the fact that they are all caricatures it is the persons of the Pickwick club that we remember and not their doings.  Like Jonson long before him, Dickens sees every man in his humor.  By his genius he enables us to see these humors too, though at times one quality in a man is shown so strongly that we fail to see any other in him, and so a caricature is produced.

Dickens himself was full of fun and jollity.  His was a florid personality.  He loved light and color, and sunshine.  He almost covered his walls with looking-glasses and crowded his garden with blazing geraniums.  He loved movement and life, overflowed with it himself and poured it into his creations, making them live in spite of rather than because of their absurdities.

Winkle, one of the Pickwickians, is a mild and foolish boaster, who pretends that he can do things he cannot.  He pretends to be able to shoot and succeeds only in hitting one of his friends.  He pretends to skate, and this is how he succeeds:—­

“‘Now,’ said Wardle, after a substantial lunch had been done ample just to, ’what say you to an hour on the ice?  We shall have plenty of time.’

“‘Capital!’ said Mr. Benjamin Allen.

“‘Prime!’ ejaculated Mr. Bob Sawyer.

“‘You skate of course, Winkle?’ said Wardle.

“‘Ye-yes; oh, yes,’ replied Mr. Winkle.  ’I—­I am rather out of practice.’

“‘Oh, do skate, Mr. Winkle,’ said Arabella.  ’I like to see it so much.’

“‘Oh, it is so graceful,’ said another young lady.  A third young lady said it was elegant, and a fourth expressed her opinion that it was ‘swanlike.’

“‘I should be very happy, I’m sure,’ said Mr. Winkle, reddening, ‘but I have no skates.’