m, and says so with, I think, a certain
amount of cheap disdain. 'He was inclined to be a literary Whiteley, a
universal provider.' Really Dickens wanted to have a say about
everything, in which he is strangely like Chesterton.

The result of this was a result that meant the greatest value: it meant
and was 'David Copperfield.' The book was for Chesterton a classic, and
it was so because it was an autobiography. It is in this work that
Dickens makes his defence of the rather exaggerated situations in some
of his books, for in this book Dickens proves that his greatest romance
is based on the experiences of his own life. 'David Copperfield is the
great answer of a romancer to the realists. David says in effect, "What!
you say that the Dickens tales are too purple really to have happened.
Why, this is what happened to me, and it seemed the most purple of all.
You say that the Dickens heroes are too handsome and triumphant! Why, no
prince or paladin in Ariosto was ever so handsome and triumphant as the
head boy seemed to me walking before me in the sun. You say the Dickens
villains are too black. Why, there was no ink in the Devil's inkstand
black enough for my own stepfather when I had to live in the same house
with him."'

This is the point that Chesterton brings out so well. The Dickens
characters are not overdrawn because, though they move between book
covers, their originals have moved on the face of the earth; they have
moved with Dickens and he has made them his own. His brilliant apology
for this alleged 'overdrawing' is one of the most effective replies ever
penned to superior Dickens detractors. It is effective because it is
true; it is true because it is obvious that Dickens created that which
lay hidden in his own mind, the misery of his factory days.

It is, I think, with this view in mind that Chesterton pays so much
attention to that period of Dickens' life which he spent in the blacking
factory, with its crude noise, its blatant vulgarity, its vile language
that left the small boy Dickens' sick, but with a sickness that
discovered his literary genius. The factory was the germ that made the
great writer. Chesterton is a true critic of Dickens because he has this
somewhat singular insight of seeing the importance of the early miseries
of Dickens' life with regard to their influence on his literary output
and his queerly favoured delineation of common folks, the sort of people
we always meet but hardly ever