Tavistock House in July, "which I know you will be glad to
receive. So well has _All the Year Round_ gone that it was yesterday
able to repay me, with five per cent. interest, all the money I advanced
for its establishment (paper, print &c. all paid, down to the last
number), and yet to leave a good L500 balance at the banker's!" Beside
the opening of his _Tale of Two Cities_ its first number had contained
another piece of his writing, the "Poor Man and his Beer;" as to which
an interesting note has been sent me. The Rev. T. B. Lawes, of
Rothamsted, St. Alban's, had been associated upon a sanitary commission
with Mr. Henry Austin, Dickens's brother-in-law and counsellor in regard
to all such matters in his own houses, or in the houses of the poor; and
this connection led to Dickens's knowledge of a club that Mr. Lawes had
established at Rothamsted, which he became eager to recommend as an
example to other country neighbourhoods. The club had been set on
foot[237] to enable the agricultural labourers of the parish to have
their beer and pipes independent of the public-house; and the
description of it, says Mr. Lawes, "was the occupation of a drive
between this place (Rothamsted) and London, 25 miles, Mr. Dickens
refusing the offer of a bed, and saying that he could arrange his ideas
on the journey. In the course of our conversation I mentioned that the
labourers were very jealous of the small tradesmen, blacksmiths and
others, holding allotment-gardens; but that the latter did so indirectly
by paying higher rents to the labourers for a share. This circumstance
is not forgotten in the verses on the Blacksmith in the same number,
composed by Mr. Dickens and repeated to me while he was walking about,
and which close the mention of his gains with allusion to

"A share (concealed) in the poor man's field,
Which adds to the poor man's store."

The periodical thus established was in all respects, save one, so
exactly the counterpart of what it replaced, that a mention of this
point of difference is the only description of it called for. Besides
his own three-volume stories of _The Tale of Two Cities_ and _Great
Expectations_, Dickens admitted into it other stories of the same length
by writers of character and name, of which the authorship was avowed. It
published tales of varied merit and success by Mr. Edmund Yates, Mr.
Percy Fitzgerald, and Mr. Charles Lever. Mr. Wilkie Collins contributed
to it his _Wom