My object in this lecture is to endeavour to explain the England which Dickens described; and I will with your permission preface my remarks by pointing out some of the disadvantages of an old society, bearing in mind its advantages also. The England in which Dickens worked was in many respects simpler in life, yet more fertile in types of character, than it is at present. I cannot but think that people got more pleasure out of living than they do in our days. Yet if I may venture upon a paradox, the world of “Pickwick” was older, and not younger, than the one in which we are living. Strictly speaking, modern England is not an “_old_” country, but a new one. Steam and electricity, the progress of science and the advance of democratic ideas have inaugurated a new age; and we, as well as you in America, live in days of experiment rather than of tradition. But the England of the thirties was an old country. It was changing rapidly, it is true; yet it is scarce an exaggeration to say that it bore a greater resemblance to the England of Queen Elizabeth than to that of the present day; but the institutions of the past, which had changed very little in character, had become more intolerable as civilisation advanced; and, consecrated by time, they pressed very heavily on the many to the great benefit of the few interested in their maintenance. The main thesis I shall put before you to-day is that it is time that an edition of Dickens appeared with a good popular commentary; for much of it is not intelligible even to an English reader at the present day: and one thing which the volumes should have is a map of the London which he is so fond of describing. Most of the sites have become so changed as to be hardly recognisable; and the appearance of the streets is so altered that one can hardly reconstruct them even in imagination. It would be no difficult task to find plans and pictures to assist one in this direction, and the result would, I think, be most illuminating to the reader. The prisons, for example, of which we read so much, the Fleet, the Marshalsea, Newgate itself, have all disappeared, and few now know even where the two former actually stood. As to the notes and comments which might be written, I hope this lecture may indicate what I mean.