The reasons for his great success and the just estimation in which he is held are usually accounted to be the marvelous vitality and re sourcefulness of his characterizations, the copi ous and rapid, though lengthy, movement of his narrative, and the unfailing spring of his humor. His power of seeing effects in situa tions and humors in character and of depicting them with a few salient strokes have probably been the cause of his adding more figures to the common store of characters than any writer since Shakespeare. Most of these figures, it has frequently been observed, are taken from the lower strata of society; with the so-called higher classes he is uniformly less successful, and in some instances wholly unconvincing. His natural habit of mind and his training as a reporter early gave him the faculty of talc ing in a large number of details at a glance, and his boyhood experience and his active life in London had furnished him with an abundance of material. The subtler effects of a more re fined or intellectual society were foreign to his early impressions and were beyond the scope of his swift, definite delineation. In this respect he would fall short of Fielding, Scott and Thackeray as an analyst of various human life, but outside of these three writers it is doubtful if any English novelists have so great a range of characterization. Certainly no English nov elist has depicted a greater number of charac ters. His performance remains, in spite of at tempts to disparage his genius, one of the most vigorous and lasting in English literature. See
DAVID COPPERFIELD ; GREAT EXPECTATIONS; OLIVER TWIST; PICKWICK PAPERS; A TALE OF Two CITIES.
Bibliography.—Standard editions of Dickens are numerous. One of the most recent is Kit ton,