is
respect outstripped the other in its marvels. In _Nickleby_ the old city
reappears under every aspect; and whether warmth and light are playing
over what is good and cheerful in it, or the veil is uplifted from its
darker scenes, it is at all times our privilege to see and feel it as it
absolutely is. Its interior hidden life becomes familiar as its
commonest outward forms, and we discover that we hardly knew anything of
the places we supposed that we knew the best.

Of such notices as his letters give of his progress with _Nickleby_,
which occupied him from February, 1838, to October, 1839, something may
now be said. Soon after the agreement for it was signed, before the
Christmas of 1837 was over, he went down into Yorkshire with Mr. Hablot
Browne to look up the Cheap Schools in that county to which public
attention had been painfully drawn by a law-case in the previous year;
which had before been notorious for cruelties committed in them, whereof
he had heard as early as in his childish days;[21] and which he was bent
upon destroying if he could. I soon heard the result of his journey; and
the substance of that letter, returned to him for the purpose, is in his
preface to the story written for the collected edition. He came back
confirmed in his design, and in February set to work upon his first
chapter. On his birthday he wrote to me, "I _have_ begun! I wrote four
slips last night, so you see the beginning is made. And what is more, I
can go on: so I hope the book is in training at last." "The first
chapter of _Nicholas_ is done," he wrote two days later. "It took time,
but I think answers the purpose as well as it could." Then, after a
dozen days more, "I wrote twenty slips of _Nicholas_ yesterday, left
only four to do this morning (up at 8 o'clock too!), and have ordered my
horse at one." I joined him as he expected, and we read together at
dinner that day the first number of _Nicholas Nickleby_.

In the following number there was a difficulty which it was marvelous
should not oftener have occurred to him in this form of publication. "I
could not write a line till three o'clock," he says, describing the
close of that number, "and have yet five slips to finish, and don't know
what to put in them, for I have reached the point I meant to leave off
with." He found easy remedy for such a miscalculation at his outset, and
it was nearly his last as well as first misadventure of the kind: his
difficulty in _Pickwick_,