as you could split up that primeval light into
innumerable solar systems. The _Pickwick Papers_ constitute first and
foremost a kind of wild promise, a pre-natal vision of all the children
of Dickens. He had not yet settled down into the plain, professional
habit of picking out a plot and characters, of attending to one thing at
a time, of writing a separate, sensible novel and sending it off to his
publishers. He is still in the youthful whirl of the kind of world that
he would like to create. He has not yet really settled what story he
will write, but only what sort of story he will write. He tries to tell
ten stories at once; he pours into the pot all the chaotic fancies and
crude experiences of his boyhood; he sticks in irrelevant short stories
shamelessly, as into a scrap-book; he adopts designs and abandons them,
begins episodes and leaves them unfinished; but from the first page to
the last there is a nameless and elemental ecstasy--that of the man who
is doing the kind of thing that he can do. Dickens, like every other
honest and effective writer, came at last to some degree of care and
self-restraint. He learned how to make his _dramatis personae_ assist his
drama; he learned how to write stories which were full of rambling and
perversity, but which were stories. But before he wrote a single real
story, he had a kind of vision. It was a vision of the Dickens world--a
maze of white roads, a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches,
clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering
figures. That vision was _Pickwick_.

It must be remembered that this is true even in connection with the
man's contemporaneous biography. Apart from anything else about it,
_Pickwick_ was his first great chance. It was a big commission given in
some sense to an untried man, that he might show what he could do. It
was in a strict sense a sample. And just as a sample of leather can be
only a piece of leather, or a sample of coal a lump of coal, so this
book may most properly be regarded as simply a lump of Dickens. He was
anxious to show all that was in him. He was more concerned to prove that
he could write well than to prove that he could write this particular
book well. And he did prove this, at any rate. No one ever sent such a
sample as the sample of Dickens. His roll of leather blocked up the
street; his lump of coal set the Thames on fire.

The book originated in the suggestion of a publisher; as many more g