mplated, at times, the
total abandonment of the Christmas book this year, and the limitation of
my labours to _Dombey and Son_! I cancelled the beginning of a first
scene--which I have never done before--and, with a notion in my head,
ran wildly about and about it, and could not get the idea into any
natural socket. At length, thank Heaven, I nailed it all at once; and
after going on comfortably up to yesterday, and working yesterday from
half-past nine to six, I was last night in such a state of enthusiasm
about it that I think I was an inch or two taller. I am a little cooler
to-day, with a headache to boot; but I really begin to hope you will
think it a pretty story, with some delicate notions in it agreeably
presented, and with a good human Christmas groundwork. I fancy I see a
great domestic effect in the last part."

That was written on the 20th of September; but six days later changed
the picture and surprised me not a little. I might grudge the space thus
given to one of the least important of his books but that the
illustration goes farther than the little tale it refers to, and is a
picture of him in his moods of writing, with their weakness as well as
strength upon him, of a perfect truth and applicability to every period
of his life. Movement and change while he was working were not mere
restlessness, as we have seen; it was no impatience of labour, or desire
of pleasure, that led at such times to his eager craving for the fresh
crowds and faces in which he might lose or find the creatures of his
fancy; and recollecting this, much hereafter will be understood that
might else be very far from clear, in regard to the sensitive conditions
under which otherwise he carried on these exertions of his brain. "I am
going to write you" (26th of September) "a most startling piece of
intelligence. I fear there may be NO CHRISTMAS BOOK! I would give the
world to be on the spot to tell you this. Indeed I once thought of
starting for London to-night. I have written nearly a third of it. It
promises to be pretty; quite a new idea in the story, I hope; but to
manage it without the supernatural agency now impossible of
introduction, and yet to move it naturally within the required space, or
with any shorter limit than a _Vicar of Wakefield_, I find to be a
difficulty so perplexing--the past _Dombey_ work taken into
account--that I am fearful of wearing myself out if I go on, and not
being able to come back to the greater unde