It was nearly ten years after the first success of Bulwer, and more than half as much after the death of Scott, that a novelist greater than any the century had seen, except Scott himself and Miss Austen, appeared. Charles Dickens and Lord Lytton became rather intimate friends; but their origins and early experiences were curiously different. Dickens' father had been in a government office; but after the Peace he took to the press, and his son (born in 1812), after some uncomfortable early experiences which have left their mark on _David Copperfield_, fled to the same refuge of the destitute in our times. He was a precocious, but not an extraordinary precocious writer; for he was four and twenty when the _Sketches by Boz_ were printed in a volume after appearing in the _Morning Chronicle_. But the _Sketches_ _by Boz_, though containing some very sprightly things, are but as farthing candles to sunlight when compared with the wonderful and wholly novel humour of _The Pickwick Papers_, which (Dickens having been first (1836) employed to write them as mere letter-press to the sporting sketches of the caricaturist Seymour) appeared as a book in 1838. From that time their author had a success which in money came second to that of Scott, and which both pecuniarily and otherwise enabled him to write pretty much as he pleased. So to the last the style of his novels never bore much reference to any public taste or demand; and he developed himself more strictly according to his own bent than almost any writer of English who was not born to fortune. During the last twenty years of his life, which ended suddenly on 9th June 1870, he was a newspaper editor--first of _Household Words_, then of _All the Year Round_; but these very periodicals were of his own making and design. He made two journeys to America: one very early in 1842, with a literary result (_American Notes_) of very sharp criticism of its people; the other late in 1867, when he made large sums by reading from his works--a style of entertainment which, again, was almost of his own invention, and which gave employment to a very strong dramatic and histrionic faculty that found little other vent. But his life was extremely uneventful, being for its last two and thirty years simply one long spell of hard though lavishly rewarded literary labour.