On June 8 seventy years ago Miss Hogarth, sister-in-law of Charles Dickens, sitting opposite him at dinner, at Gad's Hill Place near Rochester, was startled by the sudden change in the colour of his face. She asked him if he were ill. He replied very ill, but added that he would finish his dinner and go to London. "Come and lie down" Miss Hogarth entreated; "Yes, on the ground," he said very distinctly and slipping from her arms fell to the floor. He died the next afternoon, and so passed the man, who, when he gave instructions concerning his burial and tomb, enjoined that no memorial should be raised, and that only dates and his name should be inscribed on his tomb. "I rest my claim to the remembrance of my country on my published works," Dickens had the making of a great journalist, and it is well known that it was very much the result of his work as a reporter, and his industry at making notes which stood him in great stead when he embarked upon a life of fiction-writing. St ing as a boy in a solicitor's office, Dickens applied himself to learning Gurney's shorthand. and at the age of nineteen was recognized as one of the most accurate and rapid reporters in London, a fact which secured his admission to the gallery of the House of Commons a Parliamentary reporter to the "True Sun," later io the "Mirror of Parliament," and finally to the "Morning Chronicle," That he left journalism and went to novel-writing was a loss to the former but a wonderful gain for the literature of England. Dickens wrote with a keen delight in his work; he revelled in it, and when at his desk was always in the high: spirits. Thus as description of himself In a bay window in a one-pair sits, from o'clock to one. a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth. who writes and grins. as if she thought he was very funny indeed. At One he disappears, presently emerges from a bathing machine, and may be seen, a kind of salmon-colour porpoise, splashing about in the ocean. After that he may be viewed in another: bay window on the ground floor eating a strong ich; and after that walking a'dozen miles or or lying on his back on the sand readin; a book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked to, and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He's as brown as a berry, and they do say he is aw good a "mall fortune to the innkeeper, who sells beer and cold punch.
Dickens had no artistic ideals worth speaking about. The sympathy of his readers was all he cared about, and, like Cobbett, he went straight for it through the avenue of the emotions. In personality, intensity, and range of creative genius he can hardly be said to have any modern rival, but he wrote in the least disciplined of all literary genres in the most lawless milieu of the modern world, Victorian England, and yet his work is felt to be true, original and ennobling. Interest in his novels has diminished and continues to do so. but his reputation as a representative author of his age and nation has been steadily augmented, and is still mounting.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.