n confirmed.
Here was the interest of a story simply but well constructed; and
characters with the same impress of reality upon them, but more
carefully and skillfully drawn. Nothing could be meaner than the
subject, the progress of a parish or workhouse boy, nothing less so than
its treatment. As each number appeared, his readers generally became
more and more conscious of what already, as we have seen, had revealed
itself amid even the riotous fun of _Pickwick_, that the purpose was not
solely to amuse; and, far more decisively than its predecessor, the new
story further showed what were the not least potent elements in the
still increasing popularity that was gathering around the writer. His
qualities could be appreciated as well as felt in an almost equal degree
by all classes of his various readers. Thousands were attracted to him
because he placed them in the midst of scenes and characters with which
they were already themselves acquainted; and thousands were reading him
with no less avidity because he introduced them to passages of nature
and life of which they before knew nothing, but of the truth of which
their own habits and senses sufficed to assure them. Only to genius are
so revealed the affinities and sympathies of high and low, in regard to
the customs and usages of life; and only a writer of the first rank can
bear the application of such a test. For it is by the alliance of
common habits, quite as much as by the bonds of a common humanity, that
we are all of us linked together; and the result of being above the
necessity of depending on other people's opinions, and that of being
below it, are pretty much the same. It would equally startle both high
and low to be conscious of the whole that is implied in this close
approximation; but for the common enjoyment of which I speak such
consciousness is not required; and for the present Fagin may be left
undisturbed in his school of practical ethics with only the Dodger,
Charley Bates, and his other promising scholars.

With such work as this in hand, it will hardly seem surprising that as
the time for beginning _Nickleby_ came on, and as he thought of his
promise for November, he should have the sense of "something hanging
over him like a hideous nightmare." He felt that he could not complete
the _Barnaby Rudge_ novel by the November of that year, as promised, and
that the engagement he would have to break was unfitting him for
engagements he might otherwise f