INTRODUCTION.

DICKENS was a young reporter for the press when he wrote the story of "Mr. Minns and his Cousin" in this volume, the earliest of his pieces. Forster had already seen him, when Dickens headed a strike of reporters on the "True Sun," for which Forster wrote. "At this dread moment," Dickens's "keen animation of look would have arrested attention anywhere." Two years later, aged twenty-three, Dickens became a reporter for the Morning Chronicle." Late in 1833 he dropped the moving legend of Mr. Minns "into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street." In January, 1834, Mr. Minns appeared in the "Old Monthly Magazine," and, says Dickens, "I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there." He had bought the magazine at a shop in the Strand, and the person from whom he had bought it was the same who, two years later, proposed to him the scheme of "Pickwick." Meanwhile Dickens was learning, in reporting work, to write the chapter on that theme in "David Copperfield." He was also contributing his sketches to the "Monthly Magazine." His signature, "Boz," was derived from Boses = Moses, the nickname of his youngest brother, Augustus. The pieces in the "Monthly Magazine" had been unsoiled by gold, for, indeed, the editor was unable to pay for contributions. No contributor could be very long content with the mere honours of print. Dickens had paid his entrance fee in letters by these gratuities, and he transferred his later studies to a kind of evening offshoot of the "Morning Chronicle," with which Mr. George Hogarth, of a Border family, was connected. The "Chronicle" raised Dickens's salary from five to seven guineas a week: the days of £1000 for "George Silverman's Explanation" were far away in the future, but, to Dickens, seven guineas a week was affluence. Mr. Black,