range as it is, and can't settle." "Eight o'clock in the
evening,"--that points to another of his peculiarities. As he liked
best to walk in London, so he liked best to walk at night. The
darkness of the great city had a strange fascination for him. He never
grew tired of it, would find pleasure and refreshment, when most weary
and jaded, in losing himself in it, in abandoning himself to its
mysteries. Looked at with this knowledge, the opening of the "Old
Curiosity Shop" becomes a passage of autobiography. And how all these
wanderings must have served him in his art! Remember what a keen
observer he was, perhaps one of the keenest that ever lived, and then
think what food for observation he would thus be constantly
collecting. To the eye that knows how to see, there is no stage where
so many scenes from the drama of life are being always enacted as the
streets of London. Dickens frequented that theatre very assiduously,
and of his power of sight there can be no question.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] I think critics, and perhaps I myself, have been a little hard on
this Quarterly Reviewer. He did not, after all, say that Dickens would
come down like a stick, only that he might do so if he wrote too fast
and furiously.

CHAPTER V.

"Pickwick" had been a novel without any plot. The story, if story it
can be called, bore every trace of its hasty origin. Scene succeeded
scene, and incident incident, and Mr. Pickwick and his three friends
were hurried about from place to place, and through adventures of all
kinds, without any particularly defined purpose. In truth, many
people, and myself among the number, find some difficulty in reading
the book as a connected narrative, and prefer to take it piecemeal.
But in "Oliver Twist" there is a serious effort to work out a coherent
plot, and real unity of conception. Whether that conception be based
on probability, is another point. Oliver is the illegitimate son of a
young lady who has lapsed from virtue under circumstances of great
temptation, but still lapsed from virtue, and who dies in giving him
birth. He is brought up as a pauper child in a particularly
ill-managed workhouse, and apprenticed to a low undertaker. Thence he
escapes, and walks to London, where he falls in with a gang of
thieves. His legitimate brother, an unutterable scoundrel, happens to
see him in London, and recognizing him by a likeness to their common
father, bribes the thieves to recapture him when he