After a false start in
Early in 1842, Dickens and his wife went to America, where he was warmly received and where his popularity was quite as great as in England. The result of the journey is to be found in the
A short connection with the newly-founded radical journal The Daily News, early. in 1846, was followed by another journey to the Con tinent. On this trip he began (Dombey and Son,' the first number of which appeared in October 1846. Herein Dickens for the first time on an elaborate scale attempted a state ment of a moral and spiritual, rather than a political and philanthropic, problem. In the misfortunes of Mr. Dombey he preached from the text that "Pride goeth before destruction.' It is on the ground of insufficient reality that the major characters of the book have often been criticised, but there is little dissent from the view that the minor characters are done with much of Dickens's characteristic power, or that the book was one of his great popular successes.
In 1847, Dickens began a series of intel lectual diversions in the form of an organized amateur theatrical company, which included many well-known men of letters of the time — R. H. Home, Mark Lemon, Mrs. Cowden
Clarke, Wilkie Collins and others — and which gave successful amateur performances in va rious places in England. Performances of Jon son's (Every Man in His Humor' were given in Manchester and Liverpool, in July, with great success, and the following year this play alter nated with (The Merry Wives of Windsor> in London and five large towns of the kingdom. Many of the performances were for the benefit of indigent actors and men of letters, and a performance in 1851 of 'Not So Bad as We Seem,' written for the occasion by Bulwer Lytton, was acted before the queen for the benefit of the Guild of Literature and Art. During 1852, also, the company gave many rep resentations in various parts of the country. Throughout the five years of its existence Dickens was manager of the company.
Meanwhile (May 1849-November 1850), what is commonly regarded as Dickens's master piece of narrative fiction, Copperfield,' appeared. Dickens himself thought more highly of the novel than of any of the others, and looked upon it with much affection. The rea son for both the popular and the author's judg ment probably lies in the autobiographical char acter of the book. That is to say, Dickens here speaks more profoundly from his own ex perience, tells with more closeness and reality the tale of his early and introduces a larger number of those inimitable characters, which, however comic and retouched, are founded on his own observation of actual life. The humorous passages, the idyllic and the pathetic passages are unexcelled by any of his other work. On the other hand, though there are many traces and delipeations of the con ventional villain type and some soundings of the sentimental motif, these are not so marked as in such earlier novels as, for example, olas In short, Dickens, in Copperfield,> followed more closely than in any of his preceding novels the groundwork of his own knowledge and experience, at the same time losing no whit of his quality and humor. Criticism and popular verdict alike assign. to this novel a very high place in English fiction.
Before the completion of Copperfield,' Dickens had started (30 March 1850) a monthly periodical, Household Words. The design was to furnish an inexpensive and at the same time cheery and wholesome periodical for popular consumption. Its idea was to be pleasant and imaginative rather than sensa tional and literal. To this Dickens himself con tributed the novel Times' (1854), and some of Mrs. Gaskell's novels also saw the light through its pages. Coming to an end in 1859, it was followed at once by the similar periodical, All the Year Round.