me more than I can tell you," he wrote to Bulwer Lytton (July
1850), "by what you say about _Copperfield_, because I hope myself that
some heretofore deficient qualities are there." If the power was not
greater than in _Chuzzlewit_, the subject had more attractiveness; there
was more variety of incident, with a freer play of character; and there
was withal a suspicion, which though general and vague had sharpened
interest not a little, that underneath the fiction lay something of the
author's life. How much, was not known by the world until he had passed
away.

To be acquainted with English literature is to know, that, into its most
famous prose fiction, autobiography has entered largely in disguise, and
that the characters most familiar to us in the English novel had
originals in actual life. Smollett never wrote a story that was not in
some degree a recollection of his own adventures; and Fielding, who put
something of his wife into all his heroines, had been as fortunate in
finding, not Trulliber only, but Parson Adams himself, among his living
experiences. To come later down, there was hardly any one ever known to
Scott of whom his memory had not treasured up something to give minuter
reality to the people of his fancy; and we know exactly whom to look for
in Dandie Dinmont and Jonathan Oldbuck, in the office of Alan Fairford
and the sick room of Crystal Croftangry. We are to observe also that it
is never anything complete that is thus taken from life by a genuine
writer, but only leading traits, or such as may give greater finish;
that the fine artist will embody in his portraiture of one person his
experiences of fifty; and that this would have been Fielding's answer to
Trulliber if he had objected to the pigstye, and to Adams if he had
sought to make a case of scandal out of the affair in Mrs. Slipslop's
bedroom. Such questioning befell Dickens repeatedly in the course of his
writings, where he freely followed, as we have seen, the method thus
common to the masters in his art; but there was an instance of alleged
wrong in the course of _Copperfield_ where he felt his vindication to be
hardly complete, and what he did thereupon was characteristic.

"I have had the queerest adventure this morning," he wrote (28th of
December 1849) on the eve of his tenth number, "the receipt of the
enclosed from Miss Moucher! It is serio-comic, but there is no doubt one
is wrong in being tempted to such a use of power." Thinking a