To many people Pickwick remains Dickens’s best book.  “The glory of Charles Dickens,” it has been said, “will always be in his Pickwick, his first, his best, his inimitable triumph."*

Fred Harrison.

Just when Dickens began to write Pickwick he married, and soon we find him comfortably settled in a London house, while the other great writers of his day gathered round him as his friends.

Although not born in London, Dickens was a true Londoner, and when his work was done he loved nothing better than to roam the streets.  He was a great walker, and thought nothing of going twenty or thirty miles a day, for though he was small and slight he had quite recovered from his childish sickliness and was full of wiry energy.  The crowded streets of London were his books.  As he wandered through them his clear blue eyes took note of everything, and when he was far away, among the lovely sights of Italy or Switzerland, he was homesick for the grimy streets and hurrying crowds of London.

After Pickwick many other stories followed; in them Dickens showed his power not only of making people laugh, but of making them cry.  For the source of laughter and the source of tears are not very far apart.  There is scarcely another writer whose pathetic scenes are so famous as those of Dickens.

In life there is a great deal that is sad, and one of the things which touched Dickens most deeply was the misery of children.  The children of to-day are happy in knowing nothing of the miseries of childhood as it was in the days when Dickens wrote.  In those days tiny children had to work ten or twelve hours a day in factories, many schools were places of terror and misery, and few people cared.  But Dickens saw and cared and wrote about these things.  And now they are of a bygone day.  So children may remember Dickens with thankful hearts.  He is one of their great champions.

Dickens loved children and they loved him, for he had a most winning way with them and he understood their little joys and sorrows.  “There are so many people,” says his daughter writing about her father, “There are so many people good, kind, and affectionate, but who can not remember that they once were children themselves, and looked out upon the world with a child’s eyes only.”  This Dickens did always remember, and it made him a tender and delightful father to whom his children looked up with something of adoration.  “Ever since I can remember anything,” says his daughter, “I remember him as the good genius of the house, or as its happy, bright and funny genius.”  As Thackeray had a special handwriting for each daughter, Dickens had a special voice for each child, so that without being named each knew when he or she was spoken to.  He sang funny songs to them and told funny stories, did conjuring tricks and got up theatricals, shared their fun and comforted their sorrows.  And this same power of understanding which made him enter into the joys and sorrows of his children, made him enter into the joys and sorrows of the big world around him.  So that the people of that big world loved him as a friend, and adored him as a hero.