ABSTRACT
… there was never a writer privileged with so wide a personal popularity. One reason may be, because its character was identical with his own, and he reflected his own self in his imaginations. His personality, once revealed, is the counterpart of the reader’s conception of him from impersonal knowledge. There is hardly in the history of literature such another case of likeness between an author and his work; unless it be the case of one of that brilliant cluster of poets with whom the century opened, and there the likeness was England’s loss and his; while, on the contrary, the similarity between the novelist in, and out of, his works, is a pleasure to his readers and an honour to himself. The second reason why his memory is linked with his fancies, is simply because it is a memory well known, and now wonderfully perpetuated in one of the most graphic biographies ever written. If Dickens had not been one of the most remarkable men of his time, his life would still have been worth placing on record; for it was as great a romance, and as full of silent suggestion, as anything he ever wrote….
