The manuscripts now belonging to the Nation at South Kensington are placed in a glazed cabinet, standing in the middle of the room, on the right of which looks down the life-like portrait of the great novelist, painted by W. P. Frith, R.A., in 1859. The manuscript volumes are laid open in an appropriate manner, so that we have an opportunity of examining and comparing them with one another, and of observing how the precious thoughts which flowed from the fertile brain took shape and became realities. Where corrections have been made, the original ideas are so obscured that it is scarcely possible to decipher them. This is effected, not by the simple method of an obliteration of the words, as is common with some authors, by means of a line or two run through them at one stroke of the pen, but by a series of connected circles, or scroll-work flourishes, thus, [Illustration] which must have caused greater muscular labour in execution. Let any one try the two methods for himself. Dickens was fond of flourishes, as witness his first published autograph, under the portrait which was issued with _Nicholas Nickleby_ (1839). Some evidence of "writer's cramp," as it is termed, appears where the C in Charles becomes almost a G, and where the line-like flourishes to the signature thirty years later, under the portrait forming the frontispiece to _Edwin Drood_, are much shorter and less elaborate. All the earlier manuscripts are in black ink--the characteristic _blue_ ink, which he was so fond of using in later years, not appearing until _Hard Times_ was written (1854), and this continued to be (with one exception, _Little Dorrit_) his favourite writing medium, for the reason, it is said, that it was fluent to write with and dried quickly. From a valuable collection of letters (more than a dozen--recently in the possession of Messrs. Noel Conway and Co., of Martineau Street, Birmingham, and kindly shown to me by Mr. Charles Fendelow), written by the novelist between 1832 and 1833 to a friend of his earlier years--Mr. W. H. Kolle--and not hitherto published, it appears that he had not then acquired that precise habit of inscribing the place, day of the week, month, and the year which marked his later correspondence (as has been pointed out by Miss Hogarth and Miss Dickens in the preface to the _Letters of Charles Dickens_), very few of the letters to Mr. Kolle bearing any record whatever except the day of the week, occasionally preceded by Fitzroy Street or Bentinck Street, where he resided at the time. It would be extremely interesting to ascertain the reason which subsequently led him to adopt the extraordinarily precise method which almost invariably marked his correspondence from the year 1840 until the close of his life. Possibly arrangements with publishers and others may have given him the exact habit which afterwards became automatic.