Special Features

The First Book

His first published piece of writing appeared in Monthly Magazine. On the day a new issue was to come out, he went to a bookshop and asked for it. He was so overwhelmed at seeing it in print that he paced the floor for half an hour and he described the experience, "My eyes so dimmed with pride and joy that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen."

It was the same man who had sold him that copy of the monthly who came to him with an offer to write the Pickwick Papers. They took this to be a good omen and plunged into the venture, and indeed, a good omen it was.

The Reporter

As a reporter, he had become famous for his speed and accuracy. He was still boyish looking and it was often very difficult for people to believe that he was actually proficient and more than that, a master of his profession. During the legislative consideration of the Irish Coercion Bill, the chief secretary Edward Stanley had delivered so long an aspect on the Irish condition, that eight reporters working in 45-minute shifts were required to take it down. Dickens had to record the beginning and the end of the first and last parts of the speech and they appeared correctly in print. The rest was full of mistakes. Stanley who later read the speech in print, asked to meet the reporter who had taken down those two parts. Charles was taken to see him and when Stanley came in, he said, "I beg your pardon, but I expected to see the gentleman who had reported part of my speech." Embarrassed and blushing, Dickens answered, "I am that gentleman." "Oh indeed," returned Stanley, trying to hide a smile. The meeting went on. Stanley later wrote him a letter of compliment and gratitude.

Guarding The Secret

Charles never talked about his childhood, especially about the time that he had spent at the warehouse. Even his friend Forster found out about it when an acquaintance, Charles Wentworth Dilke told him that he had once seen Dickens as a child at a warehouse near the Strand. He had gone there with John Dickens and had given Charles, who owed him half a crown. When Forster spoke to him about it he listened and then moved on to another subject. Forster says that he felt he had unintentionally touched a painful place in his heart. It was not till later that Dickens told him about it, that too in a written narrative that he placed in his hands.

Presenting The Nerve Of The Society

Dickens laughed and cried when he wrote and he made his readers do the same. When he was writing the ending of The Old Curiosity Shop he had to nerve himself for Nell’s death. Writing to George Cattermole about the story, he said, "I am breaking my heart over this story …." The readers were also grief-stricken. Across the ocean, a crowd waiting at a New York pier cried to an incoming vessel from Britain, "Is Little Nell Dead?" A friend of Lord Jeffery’s found him in his library with his head bent on the table, crying. She said that he did not know of any bad news or cause for grief, or she would not have come. To this he replied, "I am a great goose to have given way so. But I couldn’t help it. You’ll be sorry to hear that Nelly, Boz’s Little Nelly is dead."