ded as strictly legal, but
such as he was afterwards able to turn to admirable account. He would
seem to have studied the profession exhaustively in all its branches,
from the topmost Tulkinghorns and Perkers, to the lowest pettifoggers
like Pell and Brass, and also to have given particular attention to
the parasites of the law--the Guppys and Chucksters; and altogether to
have stored his mind, as he had done at school, with a series of
invaluable notes and observations. All very well, no doubt, as we
look at the matter now. But then it must often have seemed to the
ambitious, energetic lad, that he was wasting his time. Was he to
remain for ever a lawyer's clerk who has not the means to be an
articled clerk, and who can never, therefore, aspire to become a
full-blown solicitor? Was he to spend the future obscurely in the
dingy purlieus of the law? His father, in whose career "something," as
Mr. Micawber would have said, had at last "turned up," was now a
reporter for the press. The son determined to be a reporter too.

He threw himself into this new career with characteristic energy. Of
course a reporter is not made in a day. It takes many months of
drudgery to obtain such skill in shorthand as shall enable the pen of
the ready-writer to keep up with the winged words of speech, and make
dots and lines that shall be readable. Dickens laboured hard to
acquire the art. In the intervals of his work he made it a kind of
holiday task to attend the Reading-room of the British Museum, and so
remedy the defects in the literary part of his education. But the best
powers of his mind were directed to "Gurney's system of shorthand."
And in time he had his reward. He earned and justified the reputation
of being one of the best reporters of his day.

I shall not quote the autobiographical passages in "David Copperfield"
which bear on the difficulties of stenography. The book is in
everybody's hands. But I cannot forego the pleasure of brightening my
pages with Dickens' own description of his experiences as a reporter,
a description contained in one of those charming felicitous speeches
of his which are almost as unique in kind as his novels. Speaking in
May, 1865, as chairman of a public dinner on behalf of the Newspaper
Press Fund, he said: "I have pursued the calling of a reporter under
circumstances of which many of my brethren at home in England here,
many of my modern successors, can form no adequate conception. I have
often t