ebruary letter, obey its cordial
bidding by immediately taking up quarters with him, I soon after joined
him at a cottage he rented in Finchley; and here, walking and talking in
the green lanes as the midsummer months were coming on, his introduction
of Mrs. Gamp, and the uses to which he should apply that remarkable
personage, first occurred to him. In his preface to the book he speaks
of her as a fair representation, at the time it was published, of the
hired attendant on the poor in sickness: but he might have added that
the rich were no better off, for Mrs. Gamp's original was in reality a
person hired by a most distinguished friend of his own, a lady, to take
charge of an invalid very dear to her; and the common habit of this
nurse in the sick room, among other Gampish peculiarities, was to rub
her nose along the top of the tall fender. Whether or not, on that first
mention of her, I had any doubts whether such a character could be made
a central figure in his story, I do not now remember; but if there were
any at the time, they did not outlive the contents of the packet which
introduced her to me in the flesh a few weeks after our return. "Tell
me," he wrote from Yorkshire, where he had been meanwhile passing
pleasant holiday with a friend, "what you think of Mrs. Gamp? You'll not
find it easy to get through the hundreds of misprints in her
conversation, but I want your opinion at once. I think you know already
something of mine. I mean to make a mark with her." The same letter
enclosed me a clever and pointed little parable in verse which he had
written for an annual edited by Lady Blessington.[67]

Another allusion in the February letter reminds me of the interest which
his old work for the _Chronicle_ gave him in everything affecting its
credit, and that this was the year when Mr. John Black ceased to be its
editor, in circumstances reviving strongly all Dickens's sympathies. "I
am deeply grieved" (3rd of May, 1843) "about Black. Sorry from my
heart's core. If I could find him out, I would go and comfort him this
moment." He did find him out; and he and a certain number of us did also
comfort this excellent man after a fashion extremely English, by giving
him a Greenwich dinner on the 20th of May; when Dickens had arranged and
ordered all to perfection, and the dinner succeeded in its purpose, as
in other ways, quite wonderfully. Among the entertainers were Sheil and
Thackeray, Fonblanque and Charles Buller, Sou