The difference between good work and excellent work is seen when we turn from even the best of the earlier writers to Charles Dickens. The novelist's father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the navy pay-office; and the circumstances of the lad's early life are universally known from _David Copperfield_, a novel largely autobiographical. Forster's biography proves that the picture of the miserable little drudge, David, is even painfully accurate. The sordid life, both of his home, with its mysterious 'deeds' leading up to his father's imprisonment in the Marshalsea, and of the London streets and the blacking warehouse, was the best possible for the development of his talents; but the bitterness of it never faded from his memory. Neither can it be denied that certain of the faults of Dickens may with probability be explained by his early life. His many fine qualities were marred by a slight strain of vulgarity, visible both in his works and in his life, from which the surroundings of a happier home would almost certainly have preserved a nature so sensitive. The family circumstances improved, and in 1824 Dickens was sent to a school at once poor and pretentious, where he remained for two years. He afterwards spent some time in a lawyer's office, but left it to become a reporter. After much toil he became, in his own words, which are confirmed by the estimate of others, 'the best and most rapid reporter ever known.' Journalism is akin to literature, and Dickens gradually drifted into authorship. His first article, _A Dinner at Poplar Walk_, now entitled _Mr. Minns and his Cousin_, appeared in the old _Monthly Magazine_ for December, 1833; and the collected papers were published in 1836, under the title of _Sketches by Boz_. They were in some respects crude, but they contained the promise of genius. The first drafts of some of Dickens's best characters are to be found in them, and the sketches are eminently fresh and independent. Few books owe less to other books than the early works of Dickens. His book was the streets of London; and even what he read was best assimilated if it had some connexion with them. George Colman's description of Covent Garden captivated him. 'He remembered,' says Forster, 'snuffing up the flavour of the faded cabbage-leaves as if it were the very breath of comic fiction;' and Forster adds, with justice, 'it was reserved for himself to give a sweeter and fresher breath to it.' For to the honour of Dickens it may be said that, despite certain lapses of taste, he seldom forgot that 'there is as much reality in the scent of a rose as in the smell of a sewer.'