Any comparison of the novels of the Victorian Era, with the novels of the Georgian Period, must be very much to the disadvantage of the former. The great epoch of English fiction began with Goldsmith and Richardson, and ended with Sir Walter Scott. It was an epoch which gave us "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Clarissa," "Tom Jones," "Pride and Prejudice," "Humphrey Clinker," and "Tristram Shandy." That fiction had a naturalness and spontaneity to which the novels of the Victorian Era can lay no claim. The novels of the period with which we are concerned aspire to regenerate mankind. Dickens, indeed, started off with but little literary equipment save sundry eighteenth century novels. He had read Smollett, and Fielding, and Sterne, diligently. But the influence of these humourists--so marked in "Pickwick"--became qualified in his succeeding books by the strenuous spirit of the times. It is alike interesting in itself and convenient for my purpose that the most popular novelist of the Victorian era should have published his first great book in 1837. Dickens awoke then to abundant fame, and his popularity has never waned for an instant during the sixty succeeding years. To-day he may be more or less decried by "literary" people, but his audience has multiplied twofold. He has added to it the countless thousands whom the School Board has given to the reading world. =Charles Dickens (1812-1870)= was born at Landport, Portsea, his father being an improvident clerk in the Navy Pay Office at Portsmouth. Dickens senior has been immortalized for us by the not too pleasing portrait of "Micawber." After infinite struggle and penury, Dickens became a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_. Under the signature of "Boz" he wrote "Sketches" for the _Monthly Magazine_ in 1834. "Pickwick" appeared from April 1836 to November 1837, and alike in parts and in book form took the world by storm. It was succeeded by "Oliver Twist" (1838), "Nicholas Nickleby" (1839), "The Old Curiosity Shop" (1840), and "Barnaby Rudge" (1841). From this time forth Dickens was the most popular writer that our literature has seen. Within twelve years after his death some four millions of his books were sold in England, and there is no reason to believe that this popularity has in any way abated, although George Eliot foretold that much of Dickens's humour would be meaningless to the next generation, that is to say, to the generation which is now with us. It is the fashion to call Dickens the novelist of the half-educated, to charge him with lack of reflectiveness, with incapacity for serious reasoning. His humour has been described as insincere, his pathos as exaggerated. Much of this indictment may with equal justice be made against Richardson and even against Jane Austen, who surely anticipated Dickens by the creation of the Rev. William Collins.