a tolerable weekly entertainment for some time, but
I had no plot in mind and I had not the remotest notion as to whither I
was going. I struggled on week by week and succeeded, as I now believe,
in producing absolutely the most formless and incoherent work of fiction
which was ever put in type. Scores of letters were sent week by week to
the editor protesting against its continuance, and at last I had worked
all my characters into such a tangle that, with the exception of the
hero and heroine and a few subordinates, whose fate it was not necessary
to particularise, I sent them all into a coal-mine, flooded the workings
and drowned the lot of them.

A very able and kindly critic told me that this amorphous first attempt
at fiction had flesh and blood but no bones, and I have learned
since that in writing a work of imagination as in much more serious
enterprises, the first essential is to be aware of your own purpose. For
some years afterwards I tried my hand on the short story, but before I
left England for the Russo-Turkish campaign, I had embarked upon a more
ambitious work, which finally took shape in _A Life's Atonement_. In the
hurry of departure I forgot my manuscript and left it at my lodgings. I
had quite resigned myself to think it lost, but when I received my
first commission for a three-volume story, it occurred to me that the
manuscript was worth inquiring after, and it surprised me agreeably to
find that it had been preserved. It was finished, sent in and accepted,
and achieved more than a commonplace success. New commissions came in,
and I found myself fairly launched as a novelist.

There is one queer thing about that first book which no critic ever
noticed so far as I know; it was, from beginning to end, a wholly
unconscious plagiarism of _David Copperfield_. Had there been no
Peggotty, there would have been no Sally Troman; had there been no
Steerforth, there would have been no Gascoigne. The greater part of the
fable and nearly all the characters I owed to Dickens, and yet I can
aver in perfect honesty that, at the time of writing and for years
afterwards, I was entirely unconscious of the fact One thing in the
book, in any case, was real. I sent my tragic hero wandering about the
country, finding shelter in all manner of low lodging-houses, and living
generally the life of a tramp. Before I put him to that experience I
went through it religiously myself, and for a whole seven weeks in the
summer, af