Most of the people we meet live in lodgings--which is a very interesting way to live in England. You hire a room and the landlady will go out and buy the food for you and serve it in your room. This gives opportunity for a good deal of conversation. It’s all very snug and cosy if you have money to pay for what you order. If you haven’t, this leads to more conversation. Many of the Dickens people didn’t have a very regular income and were not sure where the next meal was coming from. Having a good dinner was quite an event to them, and they made the most of it. It is wonderful the enjoyment they got out of eating and drinking. And how they liked to talk on such happy occasions! They were living in a hand-to-mouth way, but they didn’t seem to mind it as much as people in the world outside of the Dickens books do. They took it all as an adventure. Down in the city were the offices of the bankers and rich merchants, where clerks sat on high stools and did their accounts under the eyes of elderly gentlemen whom they didn’t like. In the suburbs there were trim little houses where people lived who were beginning to be more prosperous. One doesn’t see much of the great places. Though there were palaces in London, the people whom Dickens was interested in didn’t live in them, though they admired them very much and were proud of them in a way. For they were every-day Englishmen who lived in the days of good Queen Victoria. The great thing about London as Dickens saw it, and as we see it through his eyes, was that it was queer. The houses were queer, and the streets were queer, and the people were queer. Each one went about his business without caring a rap for what other people thought about him. If they acted in a particular way, it was because they were made that way. And yet they were friendly--most of them. And those that weren’t were such villains and hypocrites that we dislike them heartily. We always know just what to think about them, and so we don’t waste any sympathy on them. When the characters appear, we know at once which ones are to be looked upon with suspicion and which are to be trusted. You get to know the people in Dickens’s London because he is so anxious to make you see them as plainly as he does. If you don’t see them at first, he keeps on telling about them till you can’t help yourself. Now if I were to tell you that I saw a child with a face like a rosy apple, you would probably forget all about it in a minute or so. But Dickens goes at the business of description more thoroughly. He says: