in the cheapest form. From the preface to Oliver Twist we learn that romances of highwaymen had much vogue, of course among the populace, and about this time Ainsworth responded to the demand with his Jack Sheppard. Against this prevalent glorification of rascality Dickens directed his first novel, properly so called.
Pickwick cannot be classed as a novel; it is merely a great book. Everyone knows that it originated in the suggestion of a publisher that the author of Sketches by Boz should write certain facetious chapters to accompany certain facetious drawings; it was to be a joke at the expense of Cockney sportsmen. Dickens obtained permission to write in his own way. Of the original suggestion there remains Mr. Winkle with the gun; for the rest, this bit of hackwork became a good deal more than the writer himself foresaw. Obviously he sat down with only the vaguest scheme; even the personality of his central figure was not clear to him. A pardonable fault, when the circumstances are known, but the same defect appears in all Dickens's earlier books; he only succeeded in correcting it when his imaginative fervour had begun to cool, and in the end he sought by the artifices of an elaborate plot to make up for the decline of qualities greatly
