s Editor--Incident of Reporting
Days--The same more correctly told--Origin of
"Boz"--Captain Holland--Mr. George
Hogarth--Sketches in _Evening Chronicle_--C.
D.'s First Hearty Appreciator.

DICKENS was nineteen years old when at last he entered the gallery. His
father, with whom he still lived in Bentinck Street, had already, as we
have seen, joined the gallery as a reporter for one of the morning
papers, and was now in the more comfortable circumstances derived from
the addition to his official pension which this praiseworthy labor
insured; but his own engagement on the _Chronicle_ dates somewhat later.
His first parliamentary service was given to the _True Sun_, a journal
which had then on its editorial staff some dear friends of mine, through
whom I became myself a contributor to it, and afterwards, in common with
all concerned, whether in its writing, reporting, printing, or
publishing, a sharer in its difficulties. The most formidable of these
arrived one day in a general strike of the reporters; and I well
remember noticing at this dread time, on the staircase of the
magnificent mansion we were lodged in, a young man of my own age, whose
keen animation of look would have arrested attention anywhere, and whose
name, upon inquiry, I then for the first time heard. It was coupled with
the fact, which gave it interest even then, that "young Dickens" had
been spokesman for the recalcitrant reporters, and conducted their case
triumphantly. He was afterwards during two sessions engaged for the
_Mirror of Parliament_, which one of his uncles by the mother's side
originated and conducted; and finally, in his twenty-third year, he
became a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_.

A step far more momentous to him (though then he did not know it) he had
taken shortly before. In the December number for 1833 of what then was
called the _Old Monthly Magazine_, his first published piece of writing
had seen the light. He has described himself dropping this paper (Mr.
Minns and his Cousin, as he afterwards entitled it, but which appeared
in the magazine as A Dinner at Poplar Walk) stealthily one evening at
twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box in a dark
office up a dark court in Fleet Street; and he has told his agitation
when it appeared in all the glory of print: "On which occasion I walked
down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because
my eyes were so d