sterton lays great stress on the
youth of Dickens; it is only right that he should do this; the early
life of Dickens was probably responsible for the wonderful genius of his
art. The blacking factory that nearly killed the physical Dickens gave
birth to the literary Dickens. Dickens was, in fact, born at the
psychological moment, which is not to say that we are born at the
unpsychological moment, but that Dickens was born at a time that allowed
his natural powers to be used to the best advantage.

Chesterton feels this strongly. 'The background of the Dickens era was
just that background that was eminently suitable to him'; it was a
background that needed a Dickens as much as the pagan world, with all
its Greek philosophies, had needed a Christ.

He begins his study of Dickens with a keen survey of the Dickens period.
'It was,' he says, 'a world that encouraged anybody to anything. And in
England and literature its living expression was Dickens. It is useless
for us to attempt to imagine Dickens and his life unless we are able to
imagine his confidence in common men.'

It is this supreme confidence in common men that was the keynote to the
wonderful power of Dickens in making characters from those who were in a
world sense undistinguished. On this position Chesterton lays great
stress. It was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. It was the
same position that made Browning an optimist. It is the disbelief in the
Divine image in Man that makes the cynic and the pessimist.

Swift hated men because they were capable of better things but would not
realize it. Dickens knew men were kings, though ordinary men; the result
was that he loved humanity. It is a queer point of psychology that with
the same wish two such minds as Swift and Dickens came to the extremes
of the emotions of love and hate.

In some ways Dickens was more than a maker of books, he was a maker of
worlds; he tried to make 'not only a book but a cosmos.' This may be a
curious and obscure kind of clericalism that popularly expresses itself
as an effort to run with the hare and follow with the hounds, but is
really an heroic attempt to see both sides of the question, and is not a
cheap pandering after popularity.

Many critics have disliked Dickens because of this tendency of
universalism, a tendency liable to intrude on minds of a giant intellect
and a ready sympathy. Chesterton does not think that Dickens was right
in this attitude of universalis