ABSTRACT
Sala, born on 24 November 1828, was nearly twenty-three when first enlisted as one of Dickens's young men. Dickens, at thirty-nine, was not so very much older. But just as Sala's youthfulness seems to have struck Dickens at their first meeting, so did Dickens's elderly appearance surprise Sala. To Sala he was a 'spare, wiry gentleman' who looked almost fifty. His 'silky locks' had thinned and were 'grizzling'; his brows and cheeks were prematurely furrowed and wrinkled. As Sala remembered it more than forty years later, his conversation too, for all its strong political radicalism and its occasional 'comic similes' and 'waggish parallels', in general 'did not rise above the amusing commonplaces of a very shrewd, clever man of the world'.2 Peter Ackroyd, quoting this in his biography of Dickens, suggests that the last part of the description fits Sala himself better than Dickens and guesses that Dickens, with his usual sensitiveness in such situations, may simply have been adapting his conversation to 'the standard of his interlocutor' (Ackroyd, 625-6). But hardly anything we know or can conjecture about Sala supports this theory. Unlike his friend Edmund Yates, he appears all his life to have been the very reverse of a 'shrewd, clever man of the world'. And
even though he may later have exaggerated the awe and admiration that Dickens aroused in him, it is impossible to imagine him in his early twenties successfully putting on the airs of a man of the world in Dickens's presence. On the contrary, Dickens's references to him during the next five years, chiefly in further letters to Wills, indicate clearly that he recognized Sala as a vulnerable young man in need of all the forbearance and benign guidance his elders could muster.
