deavour to present him. The
story of his books, therefore, at all stages of their progress, and of
the hopes or designs connected with them, was my first care. With that
view, and to give also to the memoir what was attainable of the value of
autobiography, letters to myself, such as were never addressed to any
other of his correspondents, and covering all the important incidents in
the life to be retraced, were used with few exceptions exclusively; and
though the exceptions are much more numerous in the present volume, this
general plan has guided me to the end. Such were my limits indeed, that
half even of those letters had to be put aside; and to have added all
such others as were open to me would have doubled the size of my book,
not contributed to it a new fact of life or character, and altered
materially its design. It would have been so much lively illustration
added to the subject, but out of place here. The purpose here was to
make Dickens the sole central figure in the scenes revived, narrator as
well as principal actor; and only by the means employed could
consistency or unity be given to the self-revelation, and the picture
made definite and clear. It is the peculiarity of few men to be to their
most intimate friend neither more nor less than they are to themselves,
but this was true of Dickens; and what kind or quality of nature such
intercourse expressed in him, of what strength, tenderness, and delicacy
susceptible, of what steady level warmth, of what daily unresting
activity of intellect, of what unbroken continuity of kindly impulse
through the change and vicissitude of three-and-thirty years, the
letters to myself given in these volumes could alone express. Gathered
from various and differing sources, their interest could not have been
as the interest of these; in which everything comprised in the
successive stages of a most attractive career is written with unexampled
candour and truthfulness, and set forth in definite pictures of what he
saw and stood in the midst of, unblurred by vagueness or reserve. Of the
charge of obtruding myself to which their publication has exposed me, I
can only say that I studied nothing so hard as to suppress my own
personality, and have to regret my ill success where I supposed I had
even too perfectly succeeded. But we have all of us frequent occasion to
say, parodying Mrs. Peachem's remark, that we are bitter bad judges of
ourselves.

The other properties of these let