And in Dickens this is very important. All his novels are
outgrowths of the original notion of taking notes, splendid and
inspired notes, of what happens in the street. Those in the modern
world who cannot reconcile themselves to his method--those who feel that
there is about his books something intolerably clumsy or
superficial--have either no natural taste for strong literature at all,
or else have fallen into their error by too persistently regarding
Dickens as a modern novelist and expecting all his books to be modern
novels. Dickens did not know at what exact point he really turned into a
novelist. Nor do we. Dickens did not know, in his deepest soul, whether
he ever really did turn into a novelist. Nor do we. The novel being a
modern product is one of the few things to which we really can apply
that disgusting method of thought--the method of evolution. But even in
evolution there are great gaps, there are great breaks, there are great
crises. I have said that the first of these breaks in Dickens may be
placed at the point when he wrote _Nicholas Nickleby_. This was his
first serious decision to be a novelist in any sense at all, to be
anything except a maker of momentary farces. The second break, and that
a far more important break, is in _Dombey and Son_. This marks his final
resolution to be a novelist and nothing else, to be a serious
constructor of fiction in the serious sense. Before _Dombey and Son_
even his pathos had been really frivolous. After _Dombey and Son_ even
his absurdity was intentional and grave.

In case this transition is not understood, one or two tests may be taken
at random. The episodes in _Dombey and Son_, the episodes in _David
Copperfield_, which came after it, are no longer episodes merely stuck
into the middle of the story without any connection with it, like most
of the episodes in _Nicholas Nickleby_, or most of the episodes even in
_Martin Chuzzlewit_. Take, for instance, by way of a mere coincidence,
the fact that three schools for boys are described successively in
_Nicholas Nickleby_, in _Dombey and Son_, and in _David Copperfield_.
But the difference is enormous. Dotheboys Hall does not exist to tell us
anything about Nicholas Nickleby. Rather Nicholas Nickleby exists
entirely in order to tell us about Dotheboys Hall. It does not in any
way affect his history or psychology; he enters Mr. Squeers's school and
leaves Mr. Squeers's school with the same character, or rather absence