C6H5NH2.HNO3 + HNO2 = C6H5N2.NO3 + 2H2O,

or, as is more usually the case (since the diazonium salts themselves

are generally used only in aqueous solution) by the addition of a

well-cooled solution of potassium or sodium nitrite to a well-cooled

dilute acid solution of the primary amine. In order to isolate the

anhydrous diazonium salts, the method of E. Knoevenagel (_Ber._, 1890,

23, p. 2094) may be employed. In this process the amine salt is

dissolved in absolute alcohol and diazotized by the addition of amyl

nitrite; a crystalline precipitate of the diazonium salt is formed on

standing, or on the addition of a small quantity of ether. The diazonium

salts are also formed by the action of zinc-dust and acids on the

nitrates of primary amines (R. Mohlau, _Ber._, 1883, 16, p. 3080), and

by the action of hydroxylamine on nitrosobenzenes. They are colourless

crystalline solids which turn brown on exposure. They dissolve easily in

water, but only to a slight extent in alcohol and ether. They are very

unstable, exploding violently when heated or rubbed. _Benzene diazonium

nitrate_, C6H5N(NO3):.N, crystallizes in long silky needles. The

sulphate and chloride are similar, but they are not quite so unstable as

the nitrate. The bromide may be prepared by the addition of bromine to

an ethereal solution of diazo-amino-benzene (tribromaniline remaining in

solution). By the addition of potassium bromide and bromine water to

diazonium salts they are converted into a _perbromide_, e.g. C6H5N2Br3,

which crystallizes in yellow plates.

The diazonium salts are characterized by their great reactivity and

consequently are important reagents in synthetical processes, since by

their agency the amino group in a primary amine may be exchanged for

other elements or radicals. The chief reactions are as follows:--

1. _Replacement of -NH2 by -OH_:--The amine is diazotized and the

aqueous solution of the diazonium salt is heated, nitrogen being

eliminated and a phenol formed.

2. _Replacement of -NH2 by halogens and by the -CN and -CNO

groups_:--The diazonium salt is warmed with an acid solution of the

corresponding cuprous salt (T. Sandmeyer, _Ber._, 1884, 17, p. 2650),

or with copper powder (L. Gattermann, Ber., 1890, 23, p. 1218; 1892,

25, p. 1074). In the case of iodine, the substitution is effected by

adding a warm solution of potassium iodide to the diazonium solution,

no copper or cuprous salt being necessary; whilst for the production

of nitriles a solution of potassium cuprous cyanide is used. This

reaction (the so-called "Sandmeyer" reaction) has been investigated by

A. Hantzsch and J. W. Blagden (_Ber._, 1900, 33, p. 2544), who

consider that three simultaneous reactions occur, namely, the

formation of labile double salts which decompose in such a fashion

that the radical attached to the copper atom wanders to the aromatic

nucleus; a catalytic action, in which nitrogen is eliminated and the

acid radical attaches itself to the aromatic nucleus; and finally, the

formation of azo compounds.

3. _Replacement of -NH2 by -NO2_:--A well-cooled concentrated solution

of potassium mercuric nitrate is added to a cooled solution of benzene

diazonium nitrate, when the crystalline salt 2C6H5N2.NO3, Hg(NO2)2 is

precipitated. On warming this with copper powder, it gives a

quantitative yield of nitrobenzene (A. Hantzsch, _Ber._, 1900, 33, p.

2551).

4. _Replacement of -NH2 by hydrogen_:--This exchange is brought about,

in some cases, by boiling the diazonium salt with alcohol; but I.

Remsen and his pupils (_Amer. Chem. Journ._, 1888, 9, pp. 389 et seq.)

have shown that the main product of this reaction is usually a

phenolic ether. This reaction has also been investigated by A.

Hantzsch and E. Jochem (_Ber._, 1901, 34, p. 3337), who arrived at the

conclusion that the normal decomposition of diazonium salts by

alcohols results in the formation of phenolic ethers, but that an

increase in the molecular weight of the alcohol, or the accumulation

of negative groups in the aromatic nucleus, diminishes the yield of

the ether and increases the amount of the hydrocarbon formed. The

replacement is more readily brought about by the use of sodium

stannite (P. Friedlander, _Ber._, 1889, 22, p. 587), or by the use of

a concentrated solution of hypophosphorous acid (J. Mai, _Ber._, 1902,

35, p. 162). A. Hantzsch (_Ber._, 1896, 29, p. 947; 1898, 31, p. 1253)

has shown that the chlor- and brom- diazoniumthiocyanates, when

dissolved in alcohol containing a trace of hydrochloric acid, become

converted into the isomeric thiocyanbenzene diazonium chlorides and

bromides. This change only occurs when the halogen atom is in the

ortho- or para- position to the -N2- group.

_Metallic Diazo Derivatives._--Benzene diazonium chloride is

decomposed by silver oxide in aqueous solution, with the formation of

_benzene diazonium hydroxide_, C6H5.N(OH):.N. This hydroxide, although

possessing powerful basic properties, is unstable in the presence of

alkalis and neutralizes them, being converted first into the isomeric

benzene-diazotic acid, the potassium salt of which is obtained when

the diazonium chloride is added to an excess of cold concentrated

potash (A. Hantzsch and W. B. Davidson, _Ber._, 1898, 31, p. 1612).

_Potassium benzene diazotate_, C6H5N2.OK, crystallizes in colourless

silky needles. The free acid is not known; by the addition of the

potassium salt to 50% acetic acid at -20 deg. C., the acid anhydride,

_benzene diazo oxide_, (C6H5N2)2O, is obtained as a very unstable,

yellow, insoluble compound, exploding spontaneously at 0 deg. C. Strong

acids convert it into a diazonium salt, and potash converts it into

the diazotate. On the constitution, of these anhydrides see E.

Bamberger, _Ber._, 1896, 29, p. 446, and A. Hantzsch, _Ber._, 1896,

29, p. 1067; 1898, 31, p. 636. By the addition of the diazonium salts

to a hot concentrated solution of a caustic alkali, C. Schraube and C.

Schmidt (_Ber._, 1894, 27, p. 520) obtained an isomer of potassium

benzene diazotate. These _iso-_diazotates are formed much more readily

when the aromatic nucleus in the diazonium salt contains negative

radicals. _Potassium benzene iso-diazotate_ resembles the normal salt,

but is more stable, and is more highly ionized. Carbon dioxide

converts it into _phenyl nitrosamine_, C6H5NH.NO (A. Hantzsch). The

potassium salt of the iso-diazo hydroxide yields on methylation a

nitrogen ether, R.N(CH3).NO, whilst the silver salt yields an oxygen

ether, R.N:N.OCH3. These results point to the conclusion that the

iso-diazo hydroxide is a tautomeric substance. The same oxygen ether

is formed by the methylation of the silver salt of the normal diazo

hydroxide; this points to the conclusion that the isomeric hydroxides,

corresponding with the silver derivatives, have the same structural

formulae, namely, R.N:N.OH. These oxygen ethers contain the grouping

-N:N-, since they couple very readily with the phenols in alkaline

solution to form azo compounds (q.v.) (E. Bamberger, _Ber._, 1895, 28,

p. 225); they are also explosive.

By oxidizing potassium benzene iso-diazotate with alkaline potassium

ferricyanide, E. Bamberger (_Ber._, 1894, 27, p. 914) obtained the

_diazoic acids_, R.NH.NO2, substances which he had previously prepared

by similarly oxidizing the diazonium salts, by dehydrating the

nitrates of primary amines with acetic anhydride, and by the action of

nitric anhydride on the primary amines. Concentrated acids convert

them into the isomeric nitro-amines, the -NO2 group going into the

nucleus in the ortho- or para- position to the amine nitrogen; this

appears to indicate that the compounds are nitramines. They behave,

however, as tautomeric substances, since their alkali salts on

methylation give nitrogen ethers, whilst their silver salts yield

oxygen ethers:

/--> potassium salt --> R.N(CH3).NO2 nitramine.

R.NH.NO2<

\--> silver salt --> R.N:N.O.OCH3 diazoate.

_Phenyl nitramine_, C6H5NH.NO2, is a colourless crystalline solid,

which melts at 46 deg. C. Sodium amalgam in alkaline solution reduces it

to phenylhydrazine.

_Constitution of the Diazo Compounds._--P. Griess (_Ann._, 1866, 137,

p. 39) considered that the diazo compounds were formed by the addition

of complex groupings of the type C6H4N2- to the inorganic acids;

whilst A. Kekule (_Zeit. f. Chemie_, 1866, 2, p. 308), on account of

their ready condensation to form azo compounds and their easy

reduction to hydrazines, assumed that they were substances of the type

R.N:N.Cl. The constitution of the diazonium group -N2.X, may be

inferred from the following facts:--The group C6H5N2- behaves in many

respects similarly to an alkali metal, and even more so to the

ammonium group, since it is capable of forming colourless neutral

salts with mineral acids, which in dilute aqueous solution are

strongly ionized, but do not show any trace of hydrolytic dissociation

(A. Hantzsch, _Ber._, 1895, 28, p. 1734). Again, the diazonium

chlorides combine with platinic chloride to form difficultly soluble

double platinum salts, such as (C6H5N2Cl)2.PtCl4; similar gold salts,

C6H5N2Cl.AuCl3, are known. Determinations of the electrical

conductivity of the diazonium chloride and nitrate also show that the

diazonium radical is strictly comparable with other quaternary

ammonium ions. For these reasons, one must assume the existence of

pentavalent nitrogen in the diazonium salts, in order to account for

their basic properties.

The constitution of the isomeric diazo hydroxides has given rise to

much discussion. E. Bamberger (_Ber._, 1895, 28, pp. 444 et seq.) and

C. W. Blomstrand (_Journ. prakt. Chem._, 1896, 53, pp. 169 et seq.)

hold that the compounds are structurally different, the normal

diazo-hydroxide being a diazonium derivative of the type

R.N([3:]N).OH. The recent work of A. Hantzsch and his pupils seems to

invalidate this view (_Ber._, 1894, 27, pp. 1702 et seq.; see also A.

Hantzsch, _Die Diazoverbindungen_). According to Hantzsch the isomeric

diazo hydroxides are structurally identical, and the differences in

behaviour are due to stereo-chemical relations, the isomerism being

comparable with that of the oximes (q.v.). On such a hypothesis, the

relatively unstable normal diazo hydroxides would be the

_syn-_compounds, since here the nitrogen atoms would be more easily

eliminated, whilst the stable iso-diazo derivatives would be the

_anti-_compounds, thus:

R . N R . N

.. ..

HO . N N . OH

Normal hydroxide Iso hydroxide

(Syn-compound) (Anti-compound)

In support of this theory, Hantzsch has succeeded in isolating a

series of syn- and anti-diazo-cyanides and -sulphonates (_Ber._, 1895,

28, p. 666; 1900, 33, p. 2161; 1901, 34, p. 4166). By diazotizing

para-chloraniline and adding a cold solution of potassium cyanide, a

salt (melting at 29 deg. C.) is obtained, which readily loses

nitrogen, and forms para-chlorbenzonitrile on the addition of copper

powder. By dissolving this diazocyanide in alcohol and reprecipitating

it by water, it is converted into the isomeric diazocyanide (melting

at 105-106 deg. C.), which does not yield para-chlorbenzonitrile when

treated with copper powder. Similar results have been obtained by

using diazotized para-anisidine, a syn- and an anti- compound being

formed, as well as a third isomeric cyanide, obtained by evaporating

para-methoxy-benzenediazonium hydroxide in the presence of an excess

of hydrocyanic acid at ordinary temperatures. This salt is a

colourless crystalline substance of composition

CH3O.C6H4.N2.CN.HCN.2H2O, and has the properties of a metallic salt;

it is very soluble in water and its solution is an electrolyte,

whereas the solutions of the syn-and anti- compounds are not

electrolytes. The isolation of these compounds is a powerful argument

in favour of the Hantzsch hypothesis which requires the existence of

these three different types, whilst the Bamberger-Blomstrand view only

accounts for the formation of two isomeric cyanides, namely, one of

the normal diazonium type and one of the iso-diazocyanide type.

Benzene diazonium hydroxide, although a strong base, reacts with the

alkaline hydroxides to form salts with the evolution of heat, and

generally behaves as a weak acid. On mixing dilute solutions of the

diazonium hydroxide and the alkali together, it is found that the

molecular conductivity of the mixture is much less than the sum of the

two electrical conductivities of the solutions separately, from which

it follows that a portion of the ions present have changed to the

non-ionized condition. This behaviour is explained by considering the

non-ionized part of the diazonium hydroxide to exist in solution in a

hydrated form, the equation of equilibrium being:

C6H5.N. --> C6H5.N.OH

H2O + ... + OH' |

N <-- HO.N.H

On adding the alkaline hydroxide to the solution, this hydrate is

supposed to lose water, yielding the syn-diazo hydroxide, which then

gives rise to a certain amount of the sodium salt (A. Hantzsch,

_Ber._, 1898, 31, p. 1612),

....

C6H5.N.:OH: --> C6H5.N --> C6H5.N

| : : || ||

HO.N.:H : <-- HO.N <-- NaO.N

....

This assumption also shows the relationship of the diazonium

hydroxides to other quaternary ammonium compounds, for most of the

quaternary ammonium hydroxides (except such as have the nitrogen atom

attached to four saturated hydrocarbon radicals) are unstable, and

readily pass over into compounds in which the hydroxyl group is no

longer attached to the amine nitrogen; thus the syn-diazo hydroxides

are to be regarded as pseudo-diazonium derivatives. (A. Hantzsch,

_Ber._, 1899, 32, p. 3109; 1900, 33, p. 278.) It is generally accepted

that the iso-diazo hydroxides possess the oxime structure R.N:N.OH.

Hantzsch explains the characteristic reactions of the diazonium

compounds by the assumption that an addition compound is first formed,

which breaks down with the elimination of the hydride of the acid

radical, and the formation of an unstable syn-diazo compound, which,

in its turn, decomposes with evolution of nitrogen (_Ber._, 1897, 30,

p. 2548; 1898, 31, p. 2053).

R X R X R X

\ | \ / | |

N.:N + | --> N.:N --> | | + HCl --> R.X + N2.

/ | / \ | |

Cl H Cl H N = N

J. Cain (_Jour. Chem. Soc._, 1907, 91, p. 1049) suggested a quinonoid

formula for diazonium salts, which has been combated by Hantzsch

(_Ber._, 1908, 41, pp. 3532 et seq.). G. T. Morgan and F. M. G.

Micklethwaite (_Jour. Chem. Soc._, 1908, 93, p. 617; 1909, 95, p.

1319) have pointed out that the salts may possess a dynamic formula,

Cain's representing the middle stage, thus:

/||\ /||\ /||\

/ || \ / || \ / || \

H / N.Cl \ H H / N.Cl \ H H / N.Cl \ H

|\ || || ---> || || | ---> || || /|

| \ || || <--- || || | <--- || || / |

| \N || || N | || N |

H\\ / H H\\ | / H H \ //H

\\ / \\ | / \ //

\\ / \\| / \ //

H H H

_Diazoamines._--The diazoamines, R.N2.NHR, may be prepared by the

action of the primary and secondary amines on the diazonium salts, or

by the action of nitrous acid on the free primary amine. In the latter

reaction it is assumed that the isodiazohydroxide first formed is

immediately attacked by a second molecule of the amine. They are

yellow crystalline solids, which do not unite with acids. Nitrous acid

converts them, in acid solution, into diazonium salts.

C6H5N2.NHC6H5 + 2HCl + HNO2 = 2C6H5N2Cl + 2H2O.

They are readily converted into the isomeric aminoazo compounds,

either by standing in alcoholic solution, or by warming with a mixture

of the parent base and its hydrochloride; the diazo group preferably

going into the para-position to the amino group. When the

para-position is occupied, the diazo group takes the ortho-position.

H. Goldschmidt and R. U. Reinders (_Ber._, 1896, 29, p. 1369, 1899)

have shown that the transformation is a monomolecular reaction, the

velocity of transformation in moderately dilute solution being

independent of the concentration, but proportional to the amount of

the catalyst present (amine hydrochloride) and to the temperature. It

has also been shown that when different salts of the amine are used,

their catalytic influence varies in amount and is almost proportional

to their degree of ionization in aqueous solution. Diazoaminobenzene,

C6H5N2.NHC6H5, crystallizes in golden yellow laminae, which melt at

96 deg. C. and explode at a slightly higher temperature. It is readily

soluble in alcohol, ether and benzene. Concentrated hydrochloric acid

converts it into chlorbenzene, aniline and nitrogen. Zinc dust and

alcoholic acetic acid reduce it to aniline and phenylhydrazine.

_Diazoimino compounds_, R.N3, may be regarded as derivatives of

azoimide (q.v.); they are formed by the action of ammonia on the

diazoperbromides, or by the action of hydroxylamine on the diazonium

sulphates (J. Mai, _Ber._, 1892, 25, p. 372; T. Curtius, _Ber._, 1893,

26, p. 1271). Diazobenzeneimide, C6H5N3, is a yellowish oil of

stupefying odour. It boils at 59 deg. C. (12 mm.), and explodes when

heated. Concentrated hydrochloric acid decomposes it with formation of

chloranilines and elimination of nitrogen, whilst on boiling with

sulphuric acid it is converted into aminophenols.

_Aliphatic Diazo Compounds._--The esters of the aliphatic amino acids

may be diazotized in a manner similar to the primary aromatic amines,

a fact discovered by T. Curtius (_Ber._, 1833, 16, p. 2230). The first

aliphatic diazo compound to be isolated was _diazoacetic ester_,

CH.N2.CO2C2H5, which is prepared by the action of potassium nitrite on

the ethyl ester of glycocoll hydrochloride, HCl.NH2.CH2.CO2C2H5 + KNO2

= CHN2.CO2C2H5 + KCl + 2H2O. It is a yellowish oil which melts at -24

deg. C.; it boils at 143-144 deg. C., but cannot be distilled safely

as it decomposes violently, giving nitrogen and ethyl fumarate. It

explodes in contact with concentrated sulphuric acid. On reduction it

yields ammonia and glycocoll (aminoacetic acid). When heated with

water it forms ethyl hydroxy-acetate; with alcohol it yields ethyl

ethoxyacetate. Halogen acids convert it into monohalogen fatty acids,

and the halogens themselves convert it into dihalogen fatty acids. It

unites with aldehydes to form esters of ketonic acids, and with

aniline yields anilido-acetic acid. It forms an addition product with

acrylic ester, which on heating loses nitrogen and leaves trimethylene

dicarboxylic ester. Concentrated ammonia converts it into

_diazoacetamide_, CHN2.CONH2, which crystallizes in golden yellow

plates which melt at 114 deg. C. For other reactions see HYDRAZINE.

The constitution of the diazo fatty esters is inferred from the fact

that the two nitrogen atoms, when split off, are replaced by two

monovalent elements or groups, thus leading to the formula

N \

.. > CH.CO2C2H5, for diazoacetic ester.

N /

_Diazosuccinic ester_, N2.C(CO2C2H5)2, is similarly prepared by the

action of nitrous acid on the hydrochloride of aspartic ester. It is

decomposed by boiling water and yields fumaric ester.

_Diazomethane_, CH2N2, was first obtained in 1894 by H. v. Pechmann

(_Ber._, 1894, 27, p. 1888; 1895, 28, p. 855). It is prepared by the

action of aqueous or alcoholic solutions of the caustic alkalis on the

nitroso-acidyl derivatives of methylamine (such, for example, as

_nitrosomethyl urethane_, NO.N(CH3).CO2C2H5, which is formed on

passing nitrous fumes into an ethereal solution of methyl urethane).

E. Bamberger (_Ber._, 1895, 28, p. 1682) regards it as the anhydride

of iso-diazomethane, CH3.N:N.OH, and has prepared it by a method

similar to that used for the preparation of iso-diazobenzene. By the

action of bleaching powder on methylamine hydrochloride, there is

obtained a volatile liquid (_methyldichloramine_, CH3.N.Cl2), boiling

at 58-60 deg. C., which explodes violently when heated with water,

yielding hydrocyanic acid (CH3NCl2 = HCN + 2HCl). Well-dried

hydroxylamine hydrochloride is dissolved in methyl alcohol and mixed

with sodium methylate; a solution of methyldichloramine in absolute

ether is then added and an ethereal solution of diazomethane distils

over. Diazomethane is a yellow inodorous gas, very poisonous and

corrosive. It may be condensed to a liquid, which boils at about 0

deg. C. It is a powerful methylating agent, reacting with water to

form methyl alcohol, and converting acetic acid into methylacetate,

hydrochloric acid into methyl chloride, hydrocyanic acid into

acetonitrile, and phenol into anisol, nitrogen being eliminated in

each case. It is reduced by sodium amalgam (in alcoholic solution) to

_methylhydrazine_, CH3.NH.NH2. It unites directly with acetylene to

form pyrazole (H. v. Pechmann, _Ber._, 1898, 31, p. 2950) and with

fumaric methyl ester it forms pyrazolin dicarboxylic ester.

(F. G. P.*)

See G. T. Morgan, _B.A. Rep._, 1902; J. Cain, _Diazo Compounds_,

1908.

DIAZOMATA (Gr. [Greek: diazoma], a girdle), in architecture, the landing

places and passages which were carried round the semicircle and

separated the upper and lower tiers in a Greek theatre.

DIBDIN, CHARLES (1745-1814), British musician, dramatist, novelist,

actor and song-writer, the son of a parish clerk, was born at

Southampton on or before the 4th of March 1745, and was the youngest of

a family of eighteen. His parents designing him for the church, he was

sent to Winchester; but his love of music early diverted his thoughts

from the clerical profession. After receiving some instruction from the

organist of Winchester cathedral, where he was a chorister from 1756 to

1759, he went to London at the age of fifteen. Here he was placed in a

music warehouse in Cheapside, but he soon abandoned this employment to

become a singing actor at Covent Garden. On the 21st of May 1762 his

first work, an operetta entitled _The Shepherd's Artifice_, with words

and music by himself, was produced at this theatre. Other works

followed, his reputation being firmly established by the music to the

play of _The Padlock_, produced at Drury Lane under Garrick's management

in 1768, the composer himself taking the part of Mungo with conspicuous

success. He continued for some years to be connected with Drury Lane,

both as composer and as actor, and produced during this period two of

his best known works, _The Waterman_ (1774) and _The Quaker_ (1775). A

quarrel with Garrick led to the termination of his engagement. In _The

Comic Mirror_ he ridiculed prominent contemporary figures through the

medium of a puppet show. In 1782 he became joint manager of the Royal

circus, afterwards known as the Surrey theatre. In three years he lost

this position owing to a quarrel with his partner. His opera _Liberty

Hall_, containing the successful songs "Jock Ratlin," "The Highmettled

Racer," and "The Bells of Aberdovey," was produced at Drury Lane theatre

on the 8th of February 1785. In 1788 he sailed for the East Indies, but

the vessel having put in to Torbay in stress of weather, he changed his

mind and returned to London. In a musical variety entertainment called

_The Oddities_, he succeeded in winning marked popularity with a number

of songs that included "'Twas in the good ship 'Rover'," "Saturday Night

at Sea," "I sailed from the Downs in the 'Nancy,'" and the immortal "Tom

Bowling," written on the death of his eldest brother, Captain Thomas

Dibdin, at whose invitation he had planned his visit to India. A series

of monodramatic entertainments which he gave at his theatre, Sans Souci,

in Leicester Square, brought his songs, music and recitations more

prominently into notice, and permanently established his fame as a lyric

poet. It was at these entertainments that he first introduced many of

those sea-songs which so powerfully influenced the national spirit. The

words breathe the simple loyalty and dauntless courage that are the

cardinal virtues of the British sailor, and the music was appropriate

and naturally melodious. Their effect in stimulating and ennobling the

spirit of the navy during the war with France was so marked as to call

for special acknowledgment. In 1803 Dibdin was rewarded by government

with a pension of L200 a year, of which he was only for a time deprived

under the administration of Lord Grenville. During this period he opened

a music shop in the Strand, but the venture was a failure. Dibdin died

of paralysis in London on the 25th of July 1814. Besides his _Musical

Tour through England_ (1788), his _Professional Life_, an autobiography

published in 1803, a _History of the Stage_ (1795), and several smaller

works, he wrote upwards of 1400 songs and about thirty dramatic pieces.

He also wrote the following novels:--_The Devil_ (1785); _Hannah Hewitt_

(1792); _The Younger Brother_ (1793). An edition of his songs by G.

Hogarth (1843) contains a memoir of his life. His two sons, Charles and

Thomas John Dibdin (q.v.), whose works are often confused with those of

their father, were also popular dramatists in their day.

DIBDIN, THOMAS FROGNALL (1776-1847), English bibliographer, born at

Calcutta in 1776, was the son of Thomas Dibdin, the sailor brother of

Charles Dibdin. His father and mother both died on the way home to

England in 1780, and Thomas was brought up by a maternal uncle. He was

educated at St John's College, Oxford, and studied for a time at

Lincoln's Inn. After an unsuccessful attempt to obtain practice as a

provincial counsel at Worcester, he was ordained a clergyman at the

close of 1804, being appointed to a curacy at Kensington. It was not

until 1823 that he received the living of Exning in Sussex. Soon

afterwards he was appointed by Lord Liverpool to the rectory of St

Mary's, Bryanston Square, which he held until his death on the 18th of

November 1847. The first of his numerous bibliographical works was his

_Introduction to the Knowledge of Editions of the Classics_ (1802),

which brought him under the notice of the third Earl Spencer, to whom he

owed much important aid in his bibliographical pursuits. The rich

library at Althorp was thrown open to him; he spent much of his time in

it, and in 1814-1815 published his _Bibliotheca Spenceriana_. As the

library was not open to the general public, the information given in the

_Bibliotheca_ was found very useful, but since its author was unable

even to read the characters in which the books he described were

written, the work was marred by the errors which more or less

characterize all his productions. This fault of inaccuracy however was

less obtrusive in his series of playful, discursive works in the form of

dialogues on his favourite subject, the first of which, _Bibliomania_

(1809), was republished with large additions in 1811, and was very

popular, passing through numerous editions. To the same class belonged

the _Bibliographical Decameron_, a larger work, which appeared in 1817.

In 1810 he began the publication of a new and much extended edition of

Ames's _Typographical Antiquities_. The first volume was a great

success, but the publication was checked by the failure of the fourth

volume, and was never completed. In 1818 Dibdin was commissioned by

Earl Spencer to purchase books for him on the continent, an expedition

described in his sumptuous _Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque

Tour in France and Germany_ (1821). In 1824 he made an ambitious venture

in his _Library Companion, or the Young Man's Guide and Old Man's

Comfort in the Choice of a Library_, intended to point out the best

works in all departments of literature. His culture was not broad

enough, however, to render him competent for the task, and the work was

severely criticized. For some years Dibdin gave himself up chiefly to

religious literature. He returned to bibliography in his _Bibliophobia,

or Remarks on the Present Depression in the State of Literature and the

Book Trade_ (1832), and the same subject furnishes the main interest of

his _Reminiscences of a Literary Life_ (1836), and his _Bibliographical,

Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in the Northern Counties of England and

Scotland_ (1838). Dibdin was the originator and vice-president, Lord

Spencer being the president, of the Roxburghe Club, founded in

1812,--the first of the numerous book clubs which have done such service

to literature.

DIBDIN, THOMAS JOHN (1771-1841), English dramatist and song-writer, son

of Charles Dibdin, the song-writer, and of Mrs Davenet, an actress whose

real name was Harriet Pitt, was born on the 21st of March 1771. He was

apprenticed to his maternal uncle, a London upholsterer, and later to

William Rawlins, afterwards sheriff of London. He summoned his second

master unsuccessfully for rough treatment; and after a few years of

service he ran away to join a company of country players. From 1789 to

1795 he played in all sorts of parts; he acted as scene painter at

Liverpool in 1791; and during this period he composed more than 1000

songs. He made his first attempt as a dramatic writer in _Something

New_, followed by _The Mad Guardian_ in 1795. He returned to London in

1795, having married two years before; and in the winter of 1798-1799

his _Jew and the Doctor_ was produced at Covent Garden. From this time

he contributed a very large number of comedies, operas, farces, &c., to

the public entertainment. Some of these brought immense popularity to

the writer and immense profits to the theatres. It is stated that the

pantomime of _Mother Goose_ (1807) produced more than L20,000 for the

management at Covent Garden theatre, and the _High-mettled Racer_,

adapted as a pantomime from his father's play, L18,000 at Astley's.

Dibdin was prompter and pantomime writer at Drury Lane until 1816, when

he took the Surrey theatre. This venture proved disastrous and he became

bankrupt. After this he was manager of the Haymarket, but without his

old success, and his last years were passed in comparative poverty. In

1827 he published two volumes of _Reminiscences_; and at the time of his

death he was preparing an edition of his father's sea songs, for which a

small sum was allowed him weekly by the lords of the admiralty. Of his

own songs "The Oak Table" and "The Snug Little Island" are well-known

examples. He died in London on the 16th of September 1841.

DIBRA (Slav. _Debra_), the capital of a sanjak bearing the same name, in

the vilayet of Monastir, eastern Albania, Turkey. Pop. (1900) about

15,000. Dibra occupies a valley enclosed by mountains, and watered by

the Tsrni Drin and Radika rivers, which meet 3 m. S. It is a fortified

city, and the only episcopal see of the Bulgarian exarchate in Albania;

most of the inhabitants are Albanians, but there is a strong Bulgarian

colony. The local trade is almost entirely agricultural.

DIBRUGARH, a town of British India, in the Lakhimpur district of eastern

Bengal and Assam, of which it is the headquarters, situated on the Dibru

river about 4 m. above its confluence with the Brahmaputra. Pop. (1901)

11,227. It is the terminus of steamer navigation on the Brahmaputra, and

also of a railway running to important coal-mines and petroleum wells,

which connects with the Assam-Bengal system. Large quantities of coal

and tea are exported. There are a military cantonment, the headquarters

of the volunteer corps known as the Assam Valley Light Horse; a

government high school, a training school for masters; and an aided

school for girls. In 1900 a medical school for the province was

established, out of a bequest left by Brigade-Surgeon J. Berry-White,

which is maintained by the government, to train hospital assistants for

the tea gardens. The Williamson artisan school is entirely supported by

an endowment.

DICAEARCHUS, of Messene in Sicily, Peripatetic philosopher and pupil of

Aristotle, historian, and geographer, flourished about 320 B.C. He was a

friend of Theophrastus, to whom he dedicated the majority of his works.

Of his writings, which comprised treatises on a great variety of

subjects, only the titles and a few fragments survive. The most

important of them was his [Greek: bios tes Hellados] (_Life in Greece_),

in which the moral, political and social condition of the people was

very fully discussed. In his _Tripoliticos_ he described the best form

of government as a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, and

illustrated it by the example of Sparta. Among the philosophical works

of Dicaearchus may be mentioned the _Lesbiaci_, a dialogue in three

books, in which the author endeavours to prove that the soul is mortal,

to which he added a supplement called _Corinthiaci_. He also wrote a

_Description of the World_ illustrated by maps, in which was probably

included his _Measurements of Mountains_. A description of Greece (150

iambics, in C. Muller, _Frag. hist. Graec_. i. 238-243) was formerly

attributed to him, but, as the initial letters of the first twenty-three

lines show, was really the work of Dionysius, son of Calliphon. Three

considerable fragments of a prose description of Greece (Muller, i.

97-110) are now assigned to an unknown author named Heracleides. The _De

re publica_ of Cicero is supposed to be founded on one of Dicaearchus's

works.

The best edition of the fragments is by M. Fuhr (1841), a work of

great learning; see also a dissertation by F. G. Osann, _Beitrage zur

rom. und griech. Litteratur_, ii. pp. 1-117 (1839); Pauly-Wissowa,

_Realencyclopadie der klass. Altertumswiss_. v. pt. 1 (1905).

DICE (plural of die, O. Fr. _de_, derived from Lat. _dare_, to give),

small cubes of ivory, bone, wood or metal, used in gaming. The six sides

of a die are each marked with a different number of incised dots in such

a manner that the sum of the dots on any two opposite sides shall be 7.

Dice seem always to have been employed, as is the case to-day, for

gambling purposes, and they are also used in such games as backgammon.

There are many methods of playing, from one to five dice being used,

although two or three are the ordinary numbers employed in Great Britain

and America. The dice are thrown upon a table or other smooth surface

either from the hand or from a receptacle called a dice-box, the latter

method having been in common use in Greece, Rome and the Orient in

ancient times. Dice-boxes have been made in many shapes and of various

materials, such as wood, leather, agate, crystal, metal or paper. Many

contain bars within to ensure a proper agitation of the dice, and thus

defeat trickery. Some, formerly used in England, were employed with

unmarked dice, and allowed the cubes to fall through a kind of funnel

upon a board marked off into six equal parts numbered from 1 to 6. It is

a remarkable fact, that, wherever dice have been found, whether in the

tombs of ancient Egypt, of classic Greece, or of the far East, they

differ in no material respect from those in use to-day, the elongated

ones with rounded ends found in Roman graves having been, not dice but

_tali_, or knucklebones. Eight-sided dice have comparatively lately been

introduced in France as aids to children in learning the multiplication

table. The teetotum, or spinning die, used in many modern games, was

known in ancient times in China and Japan. The increased popularity of

the more elaborate forms of gaming has resulted in the decline of

dicing. The usual method is to throw three times with three dice. If one

or more sixes or fives are thrown the first time they may be reserved,

the other throws being made with the dice that are left. The object is

to throw three sixes = 18 or as near that number as possible, the

highest throw winning, or, when drinks are to be paid for, the lowest

throw losing. (For other methods of throwing consult the _Encyclopaedia

of Indoor Games_, by R. F. Foster, 1903.) The most popular form of pure

gambling with dice at the present day, particularly with the lower

classes in America, is _Craps_, or _Crap-Shooting_, a simple form of

_Hazard_, of French origin. Two dice are used. Each player puts up a

stake and the first caster may cover any or all of the bets. He then

_shoots_, i.e. throws the dice from his open hand upon the table. If the

sum of the dice is 7 or 11 the throw is a _nick_, or _natural_, and the

caster wins all stakes. If the throw is either 2, 3 or 12 it is a

_crap_, and the caster loses all. If any other number is thrown it is a

_point_, and the caster continues until he throws the same number again,

in which case he wins, or a 7, in which case he loses. The now

practically obsolete game of Hazard was much more complicated than

_Craps_. (Consult _The Game of Hazard Investigated_, by George Lowbut.)

_Poker dice_ are marked with ace, king, queen, jack and ten-spot. Five

are used and the object is, in three throws, to make pairs, triplets,

full hands or fours and fives of a kind, five aces being the highest

hand. Straights do not count. In throwing to decide the payment of

drinks the usual method is called _horse and horse_, in which the

highest throws retire, leaving the two lowest to decide the loser by the

best two in three throws. Should each player win one throw both are said

to be _horse and horse_, and the next throw determines the loser. The

two last casters may also agree to _sudden death_, i.e. a single throw.

_Loaded dice_, i.e. dice weighted slightly on the side of the lowest

number, have been used by swindlers from the very earliest times to the

present day, a fact proved by countless literary allusions. Modern dice

are often rounded at the corners, which are otherwise apt to wear off

irregularly.

_History._--Dice were probably evolved from knucklebones. The antiquary

Thomas Hyde, in his _Syntagma_, records his opinion that the game of

"odd or even," played with pebbles, is nearly coeval with the creation

of man. It is almost impossible to trace clearly the development of dice

as distinguished from knucklebones, on account of the confusing of the

two games by the ancient writers. It is certain, however, that both were

played in times antecedent to those of which we possess any written

records. Sophocles, in a fragment, ascribed their invention to

Palamedes, a Greek, who taught them to his countrymen during the siege

of Troy, and who, according to Pausanias (on Corinth, xx.), made an

offering of them on the altar of the temple of Fortune. Herodotus

(_Clio_) relates that the Lydians, during a period of famine in the days

of King Atys, invented dice, knucklebones and indeed all other games

except chess. The fact that dice have been used throughout the Orient

from time immemorial, as has been proved by excavations from ancient

tombs, seems to point clearly to an Asiatic origin. Dicing is mentioned

as an Indian game in the _Rig-veda_. In its primitive form knucklebones

was essentially a game of skill, played by women and children, while

dice were used for gambling, and it was doubtless the gambling spirit of

the age which was responsible for the derivative form of knucklebones,

in which four sides of the bones received different values, which were

then counted, like dice. Gambling with three, sometimes two, dice

([Greek: kuboi]) was a very popular form of amusement in Greece,

especially with the upper classes, and was an almost invariable

accompaniment to the symposium, or drinking banquet. The dice were cast

from conical beakers, and the highest throw was three sixes, called

_Aphrodite_, while the lowest, three aces, was called the _dog_. Both in

Greece and Rome different modes of counting were in vogue. Roman dice

were called _tesserae_ from the Greek word for four, indicative of the

four sides. The Romans were passionate gamblers, especially in the

luxurious days of the Empire, and dicing was a favourite form, though it

was forbidden except during the Saturnalia. The emperor Augustus wrote

in a letter to Suetonius concerning a game that he had played with his

friends: "Whoever threw a _dog_ or a six paid a _denarius_ to the bank

for every die, and whoever threw a _Venus_ (the highest) won

everything." In the houses of the rich the dice-beakers were of carved

ivory and the dice of crystal inlaid with gold. Mark Antony wasted his

time at Alexandria with dicing, while, according to Suetonius, the

emperors Augustus, Nero and Claudius were passionately fond of it, the

last named having written a book on the game. Caligula notoriously

cheated at the game; Domitian played it, and Commodus set apart special

rooms in his palace for it. The emperor Verus, adopted son of Antonine,

is known to have thrown dice whole nights together. Fashionable society

followed the lead of its emperors, and, in spite of the severity of the

laws, fortunes were squandered at the dicing table. Horace derided the

youth of the period, who wasted his time amid the dangers of dicing

instead of taming his charger and giving himself up to the hardships of

the chase. Throwing dice for money was the cause of many special laws in

Rome, according to one of which no suit could be brought by a person who

allowed gambling in his house, even if he had been cheated or assaulted.

Professional gamblers were common, and some of their loaded dice are

preserved in museums. The common public-houses were the resorts of

gamblers, and a fresco is extant showing two quarrelling dicers being

ejected by the indignant host. Virgil, in the _Copa_ generally ascribed

to him, characterizes the spirit of that age in verse, which has been

Englished as follows:--

"What ho! Bring dice and good wine!

Who cares for the morrow?

Live--so calls grinning Death--

Live, for I come to you soon!"

That the barbarians were also given to gaming, whether or not they

learned it from their Roman conquerors, is proved by Tacitus, who states

that the Germans were passionately fond of dicing, so much so, indeed,

that, having lost everything, they would even stake their personal

liberty. Centuries later, during the middle ages, dicing became the

favourite pastime of the knights, and both dicing schools (_scholae

deciorum_) and gilds of dicers existed. After the downfall of feudalism

the famous German mercenaries called _landsknechts_ established a

reputation as the most notorious dicing gamblers of their time. Many of

the dice of the period were curiously carved in the images of men and

beasts. In France both knights and ladies were given to dicing, which

repeated legislation, including interdictions on the part of St Louis in

1254 and 1256, did not abolish. In Japan, China, Korea, India and other

Asiatic countries dice have always been popular and are so still.

See Foster's _Encyclopaedia of Indoor Games_ (1903); Raymond's

_Illustriertes Knobelbrevier_ (Oranienburg, 1888); _Les Jeux des

Anciens_, by L. Becq de Fouquieres (Paris, 1869); _Das Knochelspiel

der Alten_, by Bolle (Wismar, 1886); _Die Spiele der Griechen und

Romer_, by W. Richter (Leipzig, 1887); Raymond's _Alte und neue

Wurfelspiele_; _Chinese Games with Dice_, by Stewart Culin

(Philadelphia, 1889); _Korean Games_, by Stewart Culin (Philadelphia,

1895).

DICETO, RALPH DE (d. c. 1202), dean of St Paul's, London, and

chronicler, is first mentioned in 1152, when he received the

archdeaconry of Middlesex. He was probably born between 1120 and 1130;

of his parentage and nationality we know nothing. The common statement

that he derived his surname from Diss in Norfolk is a mere conjecture;

Dicetum may equally well be a Latinized form of Dissai, or Dicy, or

Dizy, place names which are found in Maine, Picardy, Burgundy and

Champagne. In 1152 Diceto was already a master of arts; presumably he

had studied at Paris. His reputation for learning and integrity stood

high; he was regarded with respect and favour by Arnulf of Lisieux and

Gilbert Foliot of Hereford (afterwards of London), two of the most

eminent bishops of their time. Quite naturally, the archdeacon took in

the Becket question the same side as his friends. Although his narrative

is colourless, and although he was one of those who showed some sympathy

for Becket at the council of Northampton (1164), the correspondence of

Diceto shows that he regarded the archbishop's conduct as

ill-considered, and that he gave advice to those whom Becket regarded as

his chief enemies. Diceto was selected, in 1166, as the envoy of the

English bishops when they protested against the excommunications

launched by Becket. But, apart from this episode, which he

characteristically omits to record, he remained in the background. The

natural impartiality of his intellect was accentuated by a certain

timidity, which is apparent in his writings no less than in his life.

About 1180 he became dean of St Paul's. In this office he distinguished

himself by careful management of the estates, by restoring the

discipline of the chapter, and by building at his own expense a

deanery-house. A scholar and a man of considerable erudition, he showed

a strong preference for historical studies; and about the time when he

was preferred to the deanery he began to collect materials for the

history of his own times. His friendships with Richard Fitz Nigel, who

succeeded Foliot in the see of London, with William Longchamp, the

chancellor of Richard I., and with Walter of Coutances, the archbishop

of Rouen, gave him excellent opportunities of collecting information.

His two chief works, the _Abbreviationes Chronicorum_ and the _Ymagines

Historiarum_, cover the history of the world from the birth of Christ to

the year 1202. The former, which ends in 1147, is a work of learning and

industry, but almost entirely based upon extant sources. The latter,

beginning as a compilation from Robert de Monte and the letters of

Foliot, becomes an original authority about 1172, and a contemporary

record about 1181. In precision and fulness of detail the _Ymagines_ are

inferior to the chronicles of the so-called Benedict and of Hoveden.

Though an annalist, Diceto is careless in his chronology; and the

documents which he incorporates, while often important, are selected on

no principle. He has little sense of style; but displays considerable

insight when he ventures to discuss a political situation. For this

reason, and on account of the details with which they supplement the

more important chronicles of the period, the _Ymagines_ are a valuable

though a secondary source.

See W. Stubbs' edition of the _Historical Works_ of Diceto (Rolls ed.

1876, 2 vols.), and especially the introduction. The second volume

contains minor works which are the barest compendia of facts taken

from well-known sources. Diceto's fragmentary Domesday of the

capitular estates has been edited by Archdeacon Hale in _The Domesday

of St Paul's_, pp. 109 ff. (Camden Society, 1858).

DICEY, EDWARD (1832- ), English writer, son of T. E. Dicey of Claybrook

Hall, Leicestershire, was born in 1832. Educated at Trinity College,

Cambridge, where he took mathematical and classical honours, he became

an active journalist, contributing largely to the principal reviews. He

was called to the bar in 1875, became a bencher of Gray's Inn in 1896,

and was treasurer in 1903-1904. He was connected with the _Daily

Telegraph_ as leader writer and then as special correspondent, and after

a short spell in 1870 as editor of the _Daily News_ he became editor of

the _Observer_, a position which he held until 1889. Of his many books

on foreign affairs perhaps the most important are his _England and

Egypt_ (1884), _Bulgaria, the Peasant State_ (1895), _The Story of the

Khedivate_ (1902), and _The Egypt of the Future_ (1907). He was created

C.B. in 1886.

His brother ALBERT VENN DICEY (b. 1835), English jurist, was educated at

Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first class in the classical

schools in 1858. He was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1863.

He held fellowships successively at Balliol, Trinity and All Souls', and

from 1882 to 1909 was Vinerian professor of law. He became Q.C. in 1890.

His chief works are the _Introduction to the Study of the Law of the

Constitution_ (1885, 6th ed. 1902), which ranks as a standard work on

the subject; _England's Case against Home Rule_ (1886); _A Digest of the

Law of England with Reference to the Conflict of Laws_ (1896), and

_Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England

during the 19th century_ (1905).

DICHOTOMY (Gr. [Greek: dicha], apart, [Greek: temnein], to cut),

literally a cutting asunder, the technical term for a form of logical

division, consisting in the separation of a genus into two species, one

of which has and the other has not, a certain quality or attribute. Thus

men may be thus divided into white men, and men who are not white; each

of these may be subdivided similarly. On the principle of contradiction

this division is both exhaustive and exclusive; there can be no

overlapping, and no members of the original genus or the lower groups

are omitted. This method of classification, though formally accurate,

has slight value in the exact sciences, partly because at every step one

of the two groups is merely negatively characterized and therefore

incapable of real subdivision; it is useful, however, in setting forth

clearly the gradual descent from the most inclusive genus (_summum

genus_) through species to the lowest class (_infima species_), which is

divisible only into individual persons or things. (See further

DIVISION.) In astronomy the term is used for the aspect of the moon or

of a planet when apparently half illuminated, so that its disk has the

form of a semicircle.

DICK, ROBERT (1811-1866), Scottish geologist and botanist, was born at

Tullibody, in Clackmannanshire, in January 1811. His father was an

officer of excise. At the age of thirteen, after receiving a good

elementary education at the parish school, Robert Dick was apprenticed

to a baker, and served for three years. In these early days he became

interested in wild flowers--he made a collection of plants and gradually

acquired some knowledge of their names from an old encyclopaedia. When

his time was out he left Tullibody and gained employment as a journeyman

baker at Leith, Glasgow and Greenock. Meanwhile his father, who in 1826

had been removed to Thurso, as supervisor of excise, advised his son to

set up a baker's shop in that town. Thither Robert Dick went in 1830, he

started in business as a baker and worked laboriously until he died on

the 24th of December 1866. Throughout this period he zealously devoted

himself to studying and collecting the plants, mollusca and insects of a

wide area of Caithness, and his attention was directed soon after he

settled in Thurso to the rocks and fossils. In 1835 he first found

remains of fossil fishes; but it was not till some years later that his

interest became greatly stirred. Then he obtained a copy of Hugh

Miller's _Old Red Sandstone_ (published in 1841), and he began

systematically to collect with hammer and chisel the fossils from the

Caithness flags. In 1845 he found remains of _Holoptychius_ and

forwarded specimens to Hugh Miller, and he continued to send the best of

his fossil fishes to that geologist, and to others after the death of

Miller. In this way he largely contributed to the progress of geological

knowledge, although he himself published nothing and was ever averse

from publicity. His herbarium, which consisted of about 200 folios of

mosses, ferns and flowering plants "almost unique in its completeness,"

is now stored, with many of his fossils, in the museum at Thurso. Dick

had a hard struggle for existence, especially through competition during

his late years, when he was reduced almost to beggary: but of this few,

if any, of his friends were aware until it was too late. A monument

erected in the new cemetery at Thurso testifies to the respect which his

life-work created, when the merits of this enthusiastic naturalist came

to be appreciated.

See _Robert Dick, Baker of Thurso, Geologist and Botanist_, by Samuel

Smiles (1878).

DICK, THOMAS (1774-1857), Scottish writer on astronomy, was born at

Dundee on the 24th of November 1774. The appearance of a brilliant

meteor inspired him, when in his ninth year, with a passion for

astronomy; and at the age of sixteen he forsook the loom, and supported

himself by teaching. In 1794 he entered the university of Edinburgh, and

set up a school on the termination of his course; then, in 1801, took

out a licence to preach, and officiated for some years as probationer in

the United Presbyterian church. From about 1807 to 1817 he taught in the

secession school at Methven in Perthshire, and during the ensuing decade

in that of Perth, where he composed his first substantive book, _The

Christian Philosopher_ (1823, 8th ed. 1842). Its success determined his

vocation as an author; he built himself, in 1827, a cottage at Broughty

Ferry, near Dundee, and devoted himself wholly to literary and

scientific pursuits. They proved, however, owing to his unpractical turn

of mind, but slightly remunerative, and he was in 1847 relieved from

actual poverty by a crown pension of L50 a year, eked out by a local

subscription. He died on the 29th of July 1857. His best-known works

are: _Celestial Scenery_ (1837), _The Sidereal Heavens_ (1840), and _The

Practical Astronomer_ (1845), in which is contained (p. 204) a

remarkable forecast of the powers and uses of celestial photography.

Written with competent knowledge, and in an agreeable style, they

obtained deserved and widespread popularity.

See R. Chambers's _Eminent Scotsmen_ (ed. 1868); _Monthly Notices Roy.

Astr. Society_, xviii. 98; _Athenaeum_ (1857), p. 1008. (A. M. C.)

DICKENS, CHARLES JOHN HUFFAM (1812-1870), English novelist, was born on

the 7th of February 1812 at a house in the Mile End Terrace, Commercial

Road, Landport (Portsea)--a house which was opened as a Dickens Museum

on 22nd July 1904. His father John Dickens (d. 1851), a clerk in the

navy-pay office on a salary of L80 a year, and stationed for the time

being at Portsmouth, had married in 1809 Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas

Barrow, and she bore him a family of eight children, Charles being the

second. In the winter of 1814 the family moved from Portsea in the snow,

as he remembered, to London, and lodged for a time near the Middlesex

hospital. The country of the novelist's childhood, however, was the

kingdom of Kent, where the family was established in proximity to the

dockyard at Chatham from 1816 to 1821. He looked upon himself in later

years as a man of Kent, and his capital abode as that in Ordnance

Terrace, or 18 St Mary's Place, Chatham, amid surroundings classified in

Mr Pickwick's notes as "appearing" to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk,

shrimps, officers and dockyard men. He fell into a family the general

tendency of which was to go down in the world, during one of its easier

periods (John Dickens was now fifth clerk on L250 a year), and he always

regarded himself as belonging by right to a comfortable, genteel, lower

middle-class stratum of society. His mother taught him to read; to his

father he appeared very early in the light of a young prodigy, and by

him Charles was made to sit on a tall chair and warble popular ballads,

or even to tell stories and anecdotes for the benefit of fellow-clerks

in the office. John Dickens, however, had a small collection of books

which were kept in a little room upstairs that led out of Charles's own,

and in this attic the boy found his true literary instructors in

_Roderick Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Humphry Clinker_, _Tom Jones_,

_The Vicar of Wakefield_, _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_ and _Robinson

Crusoe_. The story of how he played at the characters in these books and

sustained his idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch is

picturesquely told in _David Copperfield_. Here as well as in his first

and last books and in what many regard as his best, _Great

Expectations_, Dickens returns with unabated fondness and mastery to the

surroundings of his childhood. From seven to nine years he was at a

school kept in Clover Lane, Chatham, by a Baptist minister named William

Giles, who gave him Goldsmith's _Bee_ as a keepsake when the call to

Somerset House necessitated the removal of the family from Rochester to

a shabby house in Bayham Street, Camden Town. At the very moment when a

consciousness of capacity was beginning to plump his youthful ambitions,

the whole flattering dream vanished and left not a rack behind.

Happiness and Chatham had been left behind together, and Charles was

about to enter a school far sterner and also far more instructive than

that in Clover Lane. The family income had been first decreased and then

mortgaged; the creditors of the "prodigal father" would not give him

time; John Dickens was consigned to the Marshalsea; Mrs Dickens started

an "Educational Establishment" as a forlorn hope in Upper Gower Street;

and Charles, who had helped his mother with the children, blacked the

boots, carried things to the pawnshop and done other menial work, was

now sent out to earn his own living as a young hand in a blacking

warehouse, at Old Hungerford Stairs, on a salary of six shillings a

week. He tied, trimmed and labelled blacking pots for over a year,

dining off a saveloy and a slice of pudding, consorting with two very

rough boys, Bob Fagin and Pol Green, and sleeping in an attic in Little

College Street, Camden Town, in the house of Mrs Roylance (Pipchin),

while on Sunday he spent the day with his parents in their comfortable

prison, where they had the services of a "marchioness" imported from the

Chatham workhouse.

Already consumed by ambition, proud, sensitive and on his dignity to an

extent not uncommon among boys of talent, he felt his position keenly,

and in later years worked himself up into a passion of self-pity in

connexion with the "degradation" and "humiliation" of this episode. The

two years of childish hardship which ate like iron into his soul were

obviously of supreme importance in the growth of the novelist.

Recollections of the streets and the prison and its purlieus supplied

him with a store of literary material upon which he drew through all the

years of his best activity. And the bitterness of such an experience was

not prolonged sufficiently to become sour. From 1824 to 1826, having

been rescued by a family quarrel and by a windfall in the shape of a

legacy to his father, from the warehouse, he spent two years at an

academy known as Wellington House, at the corner of Granby Street and

the Hampstead Road (the lighter traits of which are reproduced in Salem

House), and was there known as a merry and rather mischievous boy.

Fortunately he learned nothing there to compromise the results of

previous instruction. His father had now emerged from the Marshalsea and

was seeking employment as a parliamentary reporter. A Gray's Inn

solicitor with whom he had had dealings was attracted by the bright,

clever look of Charles, and took him into his office as a boy at a

salary of thirteen and sixpence (rising to fifteen shillings) a week. He

remained in Mr Blackmore's office from May 1827 to November 1828, but he

had lost none of his eager thirst for distinction, and spent all his

spare time mastering Gurney's shorthand and reading early and late at

the British Museum. A more industrious apprentice in the lower grades of

the literary profession has never been known, and the consciousness of

opportunities used to the most splendid advantage can hardly have been

absent from the man who was shortly to take his place at the head of it

as if to the manner born. Lowten and Guppy, and Swiveller had been

observed from this office lad's stool; he was now greatly to widen his

area of study as a reporter in Doctors' Commons and various police

courts, including Bow Street, working all day at law and much of the

night at shorthand. Some one asked John Dickens, during the first eager

period of curiosity as to the man behind "Pickwick," where his son

Charles was educated. "Well really," said the prodigal father, "he may

be said--haw--haw--to have educated himself." He was one of the most

rapid and accurate reporters in London when, at nineteen years of age,

in 1831, he realized his immediate ambition and "entered the gallery" as

parliamentary reporter to the _True Sun_. Later he was reporter to the

_Mirror of Parliament_ and then to the _Morning Chronicle_. Several of

his earliest letters are concerned with his exploits as a reporter, and

allude to the experiences he had, travelling fifteen miles an hour and

being upset in almost every description of known vehicle in various

parts of Britain between 1831 and 1836. The family was now living in

Bentwick Street, Manchester Square, but John Dickens was still no

infrequent inmate of the sponging-houses. With all the accessories of

these places of entertainment his son had grown to be excessively

familiar. Writing about 1832 to his school friend Tom Mitton, Dickens

tells him that his father has been arrested at the suit of a wine firm,

and begs him go over to Cursitor Street and see what can be done. On

another occasion of a paternal disappearance he observes: "I own that

his absence does not give me any great uneasiness, knowing how apt he is

to get out of the way when anything goes wrong." In yet another letter

he asks for a loan of four shillings.

In the meanwhile, however, he had commenced author in a more creative

sense by penning some sketches of contemporary London life, such as he

had attempted in his school days in imitation of the sketches published

in the _London_ and other magazines of that day. The first of these

appeared in the December number of the _Old Monthly Magazine_ for 1833.

By the following August, when the signature "Boz" was first given, five

of these sketches had appeared. By the end of 1834 we find him settled

in rooms in Furnival's Inn, and a little later his salary on the

_Morning Chronicle_ was raised, owing to the intervention of one of its

chiefs, George Hogarth, the father of (in addition to six sons) eight

charming daughters, to one of whom, Catherine, Charles was engaged to be

married before the year was out. Clearly as his career now seemed

designated, he was at this time or a little before it coquetting very

seriously with the stage: but circumstances were rapidly to determine

another stage in his career. A year before Queen Victoria's accession

appeared in two volumes _Sketches by Boz_, _Illustrative of Everyday

Life and Everyday People_. The book came from a prentice hand, but like

the little tract on the Puritan abuse of the Sabbath entitled "Sunday

under three Heads" which appeared a few months later, it contains in

germ all, or almost all, the future Dickens. Glance at the headings of

the pages. Here we have the Beadle and all connected with him, London

streets, theatres, shows, the pawnshop, Doctors' Commons, Christmas,

Newgate, coaching, the river. Here comes a satirical picture of

parliament, fun made of cheap snobbery, a rap on the knuckles of

sectarianism. And what could be more prophetic than the title of the

opening chapter--Our Parish? With the Parish--a large one

indeed--Dickens to the end concerned himself; he began with a rapid

survey of his whole field, hinting at all he might accomplish,

indicating the limits he was not to pass. This year was to be still more

momentous to Dickens, for, on the 2nd of April 1836, he was married to

George Hogarth's eldest daughter Catherine. He seems to have fallen in

love with the daughters collectively, and, judging by subsequent events,

it has been suggested that perhaps he married the wrong one. His wife's

sister Mary was the romance of his early married life, and another

sister, Georgina, was the dearest friend of his last ten years.

A few days before the marriage, just two months after the appearance of

the _Sketches_, the first part of _The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick

Club_ was announced. One of the chief vogues of the day was the issue of

humorous, sporting or anecdotal novels in parts, with plates, and some

of the best talent of the day, represented by Ainsworth, Bulwer,

Marryat, Maxwell, Egan, Hook and Surtees, had been pressed into this

kind of enterprise. The publishers of the day had not been slow to

perceive Dickens's aptitude for this species of "letterpress." A member

of the firm of Chapman & Hall called upon him at Furnival's Inn in

December 1835 with a proposal that he should write about a Nimrod Club

of amateur sportsmen, foredoomed to perpetual ignominies, while the

comic illustrations were to be etched by Seymour, a well-known rival of

Cruikshank (the illustrator of _Boz_). The offer was too tempting for

Dickens to refuse, but he changed the idea from a club of Cockney

sportsmen to that of a club of eccentric peripatetics, on the sensible

grounds, first that sporting sketches were stale, and, secondly, that he

knew nothing worth speaking of about sport. The first seven pictures

appeared with the signature of Seymour and the letterpress of Dickens.

Before the eighth picture appeared Seymour had blown his brains out.

After a brief interval of Buss, Dickens obtained the services of Hablot

K. Browne, known to all as "Phiz." Author and illustrator were as well

suited to one another and to the common creation of a unique thing as

Gilbert and Sullivan. Having early got rid of the sporting element,

Dickens found himself at once. The subject exactly suited his knowledge,

his skill in arranging incidents--nay, his very limitations too. No

modern book is so incalculable. We commence laughing heartily at

Pickwick and his troupe. The laugh becomes kindlier. We are led on

through a tangle of adventure, never dreaming what is before us. The

landscape changes: Pickwick becomes the symbol of kindheartedness,

simplicity and innocent levity. Suddenly in the Fleet Prison a deeper

note is struck. The medley of human relationships, the loneliness, the

mystery and sadness of human destinies are fathomed. The tragedy of

human life is revealed to us amid its most farcical elements. The droll

and laughable figure of the hero is transfigured by the kindliness of

human sympathy into a beneficent and bespectacled angel in shorts and

gaiters. By defying accepted rules, Dickens had transcended the limited

sphere hitherto allotted to his art: he had produced a book to be

enshrined henceforth in the inmost hearts of all sorts and conditions of

his countrymen, and had definitely enlarged the boundaries of English

humour and English fiction. As for Mr Pickwick, he is a fairy like Puck

or Santa Claus, while his creator is "the last of the mythologists and

perhaps the greatest."

When _The Pickwick Papers_ appeared in book form at the close of 1837

Dickens's popular reputation was made. From the appearance of Sam Weller

in part v. the universal hunger for the monthly parts had risen to a

furore. The book was promptly translated into French and German. The

author had received little assistance from press or critics, he had no

influential connexions, his class of subjects was such as to "expose him

at the outset to the fatal objections of vulgarity," yet in less than

six months from the appearance of the first number, as the _Quarterly

Review_ almost ruefully admits, the whole reading world was talking

about the Pickwickians. The names of Winkle, Wardle, Weller, Jingle,

Snodgrass, Dodson & Fogg, were as familiar as household words. Pickwick

chintzes figured in the linendrapers' windows, and Pickwick cigars in

every tobacconist's; Weller corduroys became the stock-in-trade of every

breeches-maker; Boz cabs might be seen rattling through the streets, and

the portrait of the author of _Pelham_ and _Crichton_ was scraped down

to make way for that of the new popular favourite on the omnibuses. A

new and original genius had suddenly sprung up, there was no denying it,

even though, as the _Quarterly_ concluded, "it required no gift of

prophecy to foretell his fate--he has risen like a rocket and he will

come down like the stick." It would have needed a very emphatic gift of

prophecy indeed to foretell that Dickens's reputation would have gone on

rising until at the present day (after one sharp fall, which reached an

extreme about 1887) it stands higher than it has ever stood before.

Dickens's assumption of the literary purple was as amazing as anything

else about him. Accepting the homage of the luminaries of the literary,

artistic and polite worlds as if it had been his natural due, he

arranges for the settlement of his family, decrees, like another Edmund

Kean, that his son is to go to Eton, carries on the most complicated

negotiations with his publishers and editors, presides and orates with

incomparable force at innumerable banquets, public and private, arranges

elaborate villegiatures in the country, at the seaside, in France or in

Italy, arbitrates in public on every topic, political, ethical,

artistic, social or literary, entertains and legislates for an

increasingly large domestic circle, both juvenile and adult, rules

himself and his time-table with a rod of iron. In his letter-writing

alone, Dickens did a life's literary work. Nowadays no one thinks of

writing such letters; that is to say, letters of such length and detail,

for the quality is Dickens's own. He evidently enjoyed this use of the

pen. Page after page of Forster's _Life_ (750 pages in the _Letters_

edited by his daughter and sister-in-law) is occupied with transcription

from private correspondence, and never a line of this but is thoroughly

worthy of print and preservation. If he makes a tour in any part of the

British Isles, he writes a full description of all he sees, of

everything that happens, and writes it with such gusto, such mirth, such

strokes of fine picturing, as appear in no other private letters ever

given to the public. Naturally buoyant in all circumstances, a holiday

gave him the exhilaration of a schoolboy. See how he writes from

Cornwall, when on a trip with two or three friends, in 1843. "Heavens!

if you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting in their

immense variety of shape, peering out of the carriage pockets! If you

could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the maniac glee

of the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old

churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy

seashore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy

heights, where the unspeakably green water was roaring, I don't know how

many hundred feet below.... I never laughed in my life as I did on this

journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and

gasping and bursting the buckles off the back of my stock, all the way.

And Stanfield"--the painter--"got into such apoplectic entanglements

that we were obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we

could recover him."

The animation of Dickens's look would attract the attention of any one,

anywhere. His figure was not that of an Adonis, but his brightness made

him the centre and pivot of every society he was in. The keenness and

vivacity of his eye combined with his inordinate appetite for life to

give the unique quality to all that he wrote. His instrument is that of

the direct, sinewy English of Smollett, combined with much of the

humorous grace of Goldsmith (his two favourite authors), but modernized

to a certain extent under the influence of Washington Irving, Sydney

Smith, Jeffrey, Lamb, and other writers of the _London Magazine_. He

taught himself to speak French and Italian, but he could have read

little in any language. His ideas were those of the inchoate and insular

liberalism of the 'thirties. His unique force in literature he was to

owe to no supreme artistic or intellectual quality, but almost entirely

to his inordinate gift of observation, his sympathy with the humble, his

power over the emotions and his incomparable endowment of unalloyed

human fun. To contemporaries he was not so much a man as an

institution, at the very mention of whose name faces were puckered with

grins or wreathed in smiles. To many his work was a revelation, the

revelation of a new world and one far better than their own. And his

influence went further than this in the direction of revolution or

revival. It gave what were then universally referred to as "the lower

orders" a new sense of self-respect, a new feeling of citizenship. Like

the defiance of another Luther, or the Declaration of a new

Independence, it emitted a fresh ray of hope across the firmament. He

did for the whole English-speaking race what Burns had done for

Scotland--he gave it a new conceit of itself. He knew what a people

wanted and he told what he knew. He could do this better than anybody

else because his mind was theirs. He shared many of their "great useless

virtues," among which generosity ranks before justice, and sympathy

before truth, even though, true to his middle-class vein, he exalts

piety, chastity and honesty in a manner somewhat alien to the mind of

the low-bred man. This is what makes Dickens such a demigod and his

public success such a marvel, and this also is why any exclusively

literary criticism of his work is bound to be so inadequate. It should

also help us to make the necessary allowances for the man. Dickens, even

the Dickens of legend that we know, is far from perfect. The Dickens of

reality to which Time may furnish a nearer approximation is far less

perfect. But when we consider the corroding influence of adulation, and

the intoxication of unbridled success, we cannot but wonder at the

relatively high level of moderation and self-control that Dickens almost

invariably observed. Mr G. K. Chesterton remarks suggestively that

Dickens had all his life the faults of the little boy who is kept up too

late at night. He is overwrought by happiness to the verge of

exasperation, and yet as a matter of fact he does keep on the right side

of the breaking point. The specific and curative in his case was the

work in which he took such anxious pride, and such unmitigated delight.

He revelled in punctual and regular work; at his desk he was often in

the highest spirits. Behold how he pictured himself, one day at

Broadstairs, where he was writing _Chuzzlewit_. "In a bay-window in a

one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long

hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins, as if he 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 lunch; and after that,

walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back on the sand reading 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 as good as a small fortune to the

innkeeper, who sells beer and cold punch." Here is the secret of such

work as that of Dickens; it is done with delight--done (in a sense)

easily, done with the mechanism of mind and body in splendid order. Even

so did Scott write; though more rapidly and with less conscious care:

his chapter finished before the world had got up to breakfast. Later,

Dickens produced novels less excellent with much more of mental strain.

The effects of age could not have shown themselves so soon, but for the

unfortunate loss of energy involved in his non-literary labours.

While the public were still rejoicing in the first sprightly runnings of

the "new humour," the humorist set to work desperately on the grim

scenes of _Oliver Twist_, the story of a parish orphan, the nucleus of

which had already seen the light in his _Sketches_. The early scenes are

of a harrowing reality, despite the germ of forced pathos which the

observant reader may detect in the pitiful parting between Oliver and

little Dick; but what will strike every reader at once in this book is

the directness and power of the English style, so nervous and unadorned:

from its unmistakable clearness and vigour Dickens was to travel far as

time went on. But the full effect of the old simplicity is felt in such

masterpieces of description as the drive of Oliver and Sikes to

Chertsey, the condemned-cell ecstasy of Fagin, or the unforgettable

first encounter between Oliver and the Artful Dodger. Before November

1837 had ended, Charles Dickens entered on an engagement to write a

successor to _Pickwick_ on similar lines of publication. _Oliver Twist_

was then in mid-career; a _Life of Grimaldi_ and _Barnaby Rudge_ were

already covenanted for. Dickens forged ahead with the new tale of

_Nicholas Nickleby_ and was justified by the results, for its sale far

surpassed even that of _Pickwick_. As a conception it is one of his

weakest. An unmistakably 18th-century character pervades it. Some of the

vignettes are among the most piquant and besetting ever written. Large

parts of it are totally unobserved conventional melodrama; but the

Portsmouth Theatre and Dotheboys Hall and Mrs Nickleby (based to some

extent, it is thought, upon Miss Bates in _Emma_, but also upon the

author's Mamma) live for ever as Dickens conceived them in the pages of

_Nicholas Nickleby_.

Having got rid of _Nicholas Nickleby_ and resigned his editorship of

_Bentley's Miscellany_, in which _Oliver Twist_ originally appeared,

Dickens conceived the idea of a weekly periodical to be issued as

_Master Humphrey's Clock_, to comprise short stories, essays and

miscellaneous papers, after the model of Addison's _Spectator_. To make

the weekly numbers "go," he introduced Mr Pickwick, Sam Weller and his

father in friendly intercourse. But the public requisitioned "a story,"

and in No. 4 he had to brace himself up to give them one. Thus was

commenced _The Old Curiosity Shop_, which was continued with slight

interruptions, and followed by _Barnaby Rudge_. For the first time we

find Dickens obsessed by a highly complicated plot. The tonality

achieved in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ surpassed anything he had attempted

in this difficult vein, while the rich humour of Dick Swiveller and the

Marchioness, and the vivid portraiture of the wandering Bohemians,

attain the very highest level of Dickensian drollery; but in the

lamentable tale of Little Nell (though Landor and Jeffrey thought the

character-drawing of this infant comparable with that of Cordelia), it

is generally admitted that he committed an indecent assault upon the

emotions by exhibiting a veritable monster of piety and long-suffering

in a child of tender years. In _Barnaby Rudge_ he was manifestly

affected by the influence of Scott, whose achievements he always

regarded with a touching veneration. The plot, again, is of the utmost

complexity, and Edgar Allan Poe (who predicted the conclusion) must be

one of the few persons who ever really mastered it. But few of Dickens's

books are written in a more admirable style.

_Master Humphrey's Clock_ concluded, Dickens started in 1842 on his

first visit to America--an episode hitherto without parallel in English

literary history, for he was received everywhere with popular

acclamation as the representative of a grand triumph of the English

language and imagination, without regard to distinctions of nationality.

He offended the American public grievously by a few words of frank

description and a few quotations of the advertisement columns of

American papers illustrating the essential barbarity of the old slave

system (_American Notes_). Dickens was soon pining for home--no English

writer is more essentially and insularly English in inspiration and

aspiration than he is. He still brooded over the perverseness of America

on the copyright question, and in his next book he took the opportunity

of uttering a few of his impressions about the objectionable sides of

American democracy, the result being that "all Yankee-doodle-dom blazed

up like one universal soda bottle," as Carlyle said. _Martin Chuzzlewit_

(1843-1844) is important as closing his great character period. His

_seve originale_, as the French would say, was by this time to a

considerable extent exhausted, and he had to depend more upon artistic

elaboration, upon satires, upon _tours de force_ of description, upon

romantic and ingenious contrivances. But all these resources combined

proved unequal to his powers as an original observer of popular types,

until he reinforced himself by autobiographic reminiscence, as in _David

Copperfield_ and _Great Expectations_, the two great books remaining to

his later career.

After these two masterpieces and the three wonderful books with which he

made his debut, we are inclined to rank _Chuzzlewit_. Nothing in Dickens

is more admirably seen and presented than Todgers's, a bit of London

particular cut out with a knife. Mr Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, Betsy Prig

and "Mrs Harris" have passed into the national language and life. The

coach journey, the windy autumn night, the stealthy trail of Jonas, the

undertone of tragedy in the Charity and Mercy and Chuffey episodes

suggest a blending of imaginative vision and physical penetration hardly

seen elsewhere. Two things are specially notable about this novel--the

exceptional care taken over it (as shown by the interlineations in the

MS.) and the caprice or nonchalance of the purchasing public, its sales

being far lower than those of any of its monthly predecessors.

At the close of 1843, to pay outstanding debts of his now lavish

housekeeping, he wrote that pioneer of Christmas numbers, that national

benefit as Thackeray called it, _A Christmas Carol_. It failed to

realize his pecuniary anticipations, and Dickens resolved upon a drastic

policy of retrenchment and reform. He would save expense by living

abroad and would punish his publishers by withdrawing his custom from

them, at least for a time. Like everything else upon which he ever

determined, this resolution was carried out with the greatest possible

precision and despatch. In June 1844 he set out for Marseilles with his

now rapidly increasing family (the journey cost him L200). In a villa on

the outskirts of Genoa he wrote _The Chimes_, which, during a brief

excursion to London before Christmas, he read to a select circle of

friends (the germ of his subsequent lecture-audiences), including

Forster, Carlyle, Stanfield, Dyce, Maclise and Jerrold. He was again in

London in 1845, enjoying his favourite diversion of private theatricals;

and in January 1846 he experimented briefly as the editor of a London

morning paper--the _Daily News_. By early spring he was back at

Lausanne, writing his customary vivid letters to his friends, craving as

usual for London streets, commencing _Dombey and Son_, and walking his

fourteen miles daily. The success of _Dombey and Son_ completely

rehabilitated the master's finances, enabled him to return to England,

send his son to Eton and to begin to save money. Artistically it is less

satisfactory; it contains some of Dickens's prime curios, such as

Cuttle, Bunsby, Toots, Blimber, Pipchin, Mrs MacStinger and young Biler;

it contains also that masterpiece of sentimentality which trembles upon

the borderland of the sublime and the ridiculous, the death of Paul

Dombey ("that sweet Paul," as Jeffrey, the "critic laureate," called

him), and some grievous and unquestionable blemishes. As a narrative,

moreover, it tails off into a highly complicated and exacting plot. It

was followed by a long rest at Broadstairs before Dickens returned to

the native home of his genius, and early in 1849 "began to prepare for

_David Copperfield_."

"Of all my books," Dickens wrote, "I like this the best; like many fond

parents I have my favourite child, and his name is David Copperfield."

In some respects it stands to Dickens in something of the same relation

in which the contemporary _Pendennis_ stands to Thackeray. As in that

book, too, the earlier portions are the best. They gained in intensity

by the autobiographical form into which they are thrown; as Thackeray

observed, there was no writing against such power. The tragedy of Emily

and the character of Rosa Dartle are stagey and unreal; Uriah Heep is

bad art; Agnes, again, is far less convincing as a consolation than

Dickens would have us believe; but these are more than compensated by

the wonderful realization of early boyhood in the book, by the picture

of Mr Creakle's school, the Peggottys, the inimitable Mr Micawber, Betsy

Trotwood and that monument of selfish misery, Mrs Gummidge.

At the end of March 1850 commenced the new twopenny weekly called

_Household Words_, which Dickens planned to form a direct means of

communication between himself and his readers, and as a means of

collecting around him and encouraging the talents of the younger

generation. No one was better qualified than he for this work, whether

we consider his complete freedom from literary jealousy or his magical

gift of inspiring young authors. Following the somewhat dreary and

incoherent _Bleak House_ of 1852, _Hard Times_ (1854)--an

anti-Manchester School tract, which Ruskin regarded as Dickens's best

work--was the first long story written for _Household Words_. About this

time Dickens made his final home at Gad's Hill, near Rochester, and put

the finishing touch to another long novel published upon the old plan,

_Little Dorrit_ (1855-1857). In spite of the exquisite comedy of the

master of the Marshalsea and the final tragedy of the central figure,

_Little Dorrit_ is sadly deficient in the old vitality, the humour is

often a mock reality, and the repetition of comic catch-words and

overstrung similes and metaphors is such as to affect the reader with

nervous irritation. The plot and characters ruin each other in this

amorphous production. The _Tale of Two Cities_, commenced in _All the

Year Round_ (the successor of _Household Words_) in 1859, is much

better: the main characters are powerful, the story genuinely tragic,

and the atmosphere lurid; but enormous labour was everywhere expended

upon the construction of stylistic ornament.

The _Tale of Two Cities_ was followed by two finer efforts at

atmospheric delineation, the best things he ever did of this kind:

_Great Expectations_ (1861), over which there broods the mournful

impression of the foggy marshes of the Lower Thames; and _Our Mutual

Friend_ (1864-1865), in which the ooze and mud and slime of Rotherhithe,

its boatmen and loafers, are made to pervade the whole book with

cumulative effect. The general effect produced by the stories is,

however, very different. In the first case, the foreground was supplied

by autobiographical material of the most vivid interest, and the

lucidity of the creative impulse impelled him to write upon this

occasion with the old simplicity, though with an added power. Nothing

therefore, in the whole range of Dickens surpassed the early chapters of

_Great Expectations_ in perfection of technique or in mastery of all the

resources of the novelist's art. To have created Abel Magwitch alone is

to be a god indeed, says Mr Swinburne, among the creators of deathless

men. Pumblechook is actually better and droller and truer to imaginative

life than Pecksniff; Joe Gargery is worthy to have been praised and

loved at once by Fielding and by Sterne: Mr Jaggers and his clients, Mr

Wemmick and his parent and his bride, are such figures as Shakespeare,

when dropping out of poetry, might have created, if his lot had been

cast in a later century. "Can as much be said," Mr Swinburne boldly

asks, "for the creatures of any other man or god?"

In November 1867 Dickens made a second expedition to America, leaving

all the writing that he was ever to complete behind him. He was to make

a round sum of money, enough to free him from all embarrassments, by a

long series of exhausting readings, commencing at the Tremont Temple,

Boston, on the 2nd of December. The strain of Dickens's ordinary life

was so tense and so continuous that it is, perhaps, rash to assume that

he broke down eventually under this particular stress; for other

reasons, however, his persistence in these readings, subsequent to his

return, was strongly deprecated by his literary friends, led by the

arbitrary and relentless Forster. It is a long testimony to Dickens's

self-restraint, even in his most capricious and despotic moments, that

he never broke the cord of obligation which bound him to his literary

mentor, though sparring matches between them were latterly of frequent

occurrence. His farewell reading was given on the 15th of March 1870, at

St James's Hall. He then vanished from "those garish lights," as he

called them, "for evermore." Of the three brief months that remained to

him, his last book, _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, was the chief

occupation. It hardly promised to become a masterpiece (Longfellow's

opinion) as did Thackeray's _Denis Duval_, but contained much fine

descriptive technique, grouped round a scene of which Dickens had an

unrivalled sympathetic knowledge.

In March and April 1870 Dickens, as was his wont, was mixing in the best

society; he dined with the prince at Lord Houghton's and was twice at

court, once at a long deferred private interview with the queen, who had

given him a presentation copy of her _Leaves from a Journal of our Life

in the Highlands_ with the inscription "From one of the humblest of

authors to one of the greatest"; and who now begged him on his

persistent refusal of any other title to accept the nominal distinction

of a privy councillor. He took for four months the Milner Gibsons' house

at 5 Hyde Park Place, opposite the Marble Arch, where he gave a

brilliant reception on the 7th of April. His last public appearance was

made at the Royal Academy banquet early in May. He returned to his

regular methodical routine of work at Gad's Hill on the 30th of May, and

one of the last instalments he wrote of _Edwin Drood_ contained an

ominous speculation as to the next two people to die at Cloisterham:

"Curious to make a guess at the two, or say at one of the two." Two

letters bearing the well-known superscription "Gad's Hill Place, Higham

by Rochester, Kent" are dated the 8th of June, and, on the same

Thursday, after a long spell of writing in the Chalet where he

habitually wrote, he collapsed suddenly at dinner. Startled by the

sudden change in the colour and expression of his face, his

sister-in-law (Miss Hogarth) asked him if he was ill; he said "Yes, very

ill," but added that he would finish dinner and go on afterwards to

London. "Come and lie down," she entreated; "Yes, on the ground," he

said, very distinctly; these were the last words he spoke, and he slid

from her arms and fell upon the floor. He died at 6-10 P.M. on Friday,

the 9th of June, and was buried privately in Poets' Corner, Westminster

Abbey, in the early morning of the 14th of June. One of the most

appealing memorials was the drawing by his "new illustrator" Luke Fildes

in the _Graphic_ of "The Empty Chair; Gad's Hill: ninth of June, 1870."

"Statesmen, men of science, philanthropists, the acknowledged

benefactors of their race, might pass away, and yet not leave the void

which will be caused by the death of Charles Dickens" (_The Times_). In

his will he enjoined his friends to erect no monument in his honour, and

directed his name and dates only to be inscribed on his tomb, adding

this proud provision, "I rest my claim to the remembrance of my country

on my published works."

Dickens had no artistic ideals worth speaking about. The sympathy of his

readers was the one thing 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. His creations live, move and have their being about us

constantly, like those of Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes,

Shakespeare, Bunyan, Moliere and Sir Walter Scott. As to the books

themselves, the backgrounds on which these mighty figures are projected,

they are manifestly too vast, too chaotic and too unequal ever to become

classics. Like most of the novels constructed upon the unreformed model

of Smollett and Fielding, those of Dickens are enormous stock-pots into

which the author casts every kind of autobiographical experience,

emotion, pleasantry, anecdote, adage or apophthegm. The fusion is

necessarily very incomplete and the hotch-potch is bound to fall to

pieces with time. Dickens's plots, it must be admitted, are strangely

unintelligible, the repetitions and stylistic decorations of his work

exceed all bounds, the form is unmanageable and insignificant. The

diffuseness of the English novel, in short, and its extravagant

didacticism cannot fail to be most prejudicial to its perpetuation. In

these circumstances there is very little fiction that will stand

concentration and condensation so well as that of Dickens.

For these reasons among others our interest in Dickens's novels as

integers has diminished and is diminishing. But, on the other hand, our

interest and pride in him as a man and as a representative author of his

age and nation has been steadily augmented and is still mounting. Much

of the old criticism of his work, that it was not up to a sufficiently

high level of art, scholarship or gentility, that as an author he is

given to caricature, redundancy and a shameless subservience to popular

caprice, must now be discarded as irrelevant.

As regards formal excellence it is plain that Dickens labours under the

double disadvantage of writing in the least disciplined of all literary

genres in the most lawless literary milieu of the modern world, that of

Victorian England. In spite of these defects, which are those of masters

such as Rabelais, Hugo and Tolstoy, the work of Dickens is more and more

instinctively felt to be true, original and ennobling. It is already

beginning to undergo a process of automatic sifting, segregation and

crystallization, at the conclusion of which it will probably occupy a

larger segment in the literary consciousness of the English-spoken race

than ever before.

Portraits of Dickens, from the gay and alert "Boz" of Samuel Lawrence,

and the self-conscious, rather foppish portrait by Maclise which served

as frontispiece to _Nicholas Nickleby_, to the sketch of him as Bobadil

by C. R. Leslie, the Drummond and Ary Scheffer portraits of middle age

and the haggard and drawn representations of him from photographs after

his shattering experiences as a public entertainer from 1856 (the year

of his separation from his wife) onwards, are reproduced in Kitton, in

Forster and Gissing and in the other biographies. Sketches are also

given in most of the books of his successive dwelling places at Ordnance

Terrace and 18 St Mary's Place, Chatham; Bayham Street, Camden Town; 15

Furnival's Inn; 48 Doughty Street; 1 Devonshire Terrace, Regent's Park;

Tavistock House, Tavistock Square; and Gad's Hill Place. The manuscripts

of all the novels, with the exception of the _Tale of Two Cities_ and

_Edwin Drood_, were given to Forster, and are now preserved in the Dyce

and Forster Museum at South Kensington. The work of Dickens was a prize

for which publishers naturally contended both before and after his

death. The first collective edition of his works was begun in April

1847, and their number is now very great. The most complete is still

that of Messrs Chapman & Hall, the original publishers of _Pickwick_;

others of special interest are the Harrap edition, originally edited by

F. G. Kitton; Macmillan's edition with original illustrations and

introduction by Charles Dickens the younger; and the edition in the

World's Classics with introductions by G.K. Chesterton. Of the

translations the best known is that done into French by Lorain, Pichot

and others, with B.H. Gausseron's excellent _Pages Choisies_ (1903).

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--During his lifetime Dickens's biographer was clearly

indicated in his guide, philosopher and friend, John Forster, who had

known the novelist intimately since the days of his first triumph with

_Pickwick_, who had constituted himself a veritable encyclopaedia of

information about Dickens, and had clung to his subject (in spite of

many rebuffs which his peremptory temper found it hard to digest) as

tightly as ever Boswell had enveloped Johnson. Two volumes of

Forster's _Life of Charles Dickens_ appeared in 1872 and a third in

1874. He relied much on Dickens's letters to himself and produced what

must always remain the authoritative work. The first two volumes are

put together with much art, the portrait as a whole has been regarded

as truthful, and the immediate success was extraordinary. In the

opinion of Carlyle, Forster's book was not unworthy to be named after

that of Boswell. A useful abridgment was carried out in 1903 by the

novelist George Gissing. Gissing also wrote _Charles Dickens: A

Critical Study_ (1898), which ranks with G.K. Chesterton's _Charles

Dickens_(1906) as a commentary inspired by deep insight and adorned by

great literary talent upon the genius of the master-novelist. The

names of other lives, sketches, articles and estimates of Dickens and

his works would occupy a large volume in the mere enumeration. See

R.H. Shepherd, _The Bibliography of Dickens_ (1880); _James Cooke's

Bibliography of the Writings of Charles Dickens_ (1879);

_Dickensiana_, by F. G. Kitton (1886); and _Bibliography_ by J.P.

Anderson, appended to Sir F.T. Marzials's _Life of Charles Dickens_

(1887). Among the earlier sketches may be specially cited the lives by

J. C. Hotten and G. A. Sala (1870), the Anecdote-Biography edited by

the American R. H. Stoddard (1874), Dr A. W. Ward in the English Men

of Letters Series (1878), that by Sir Leslie Stephen in the

_Dictionary of National Biography_, and that by Professor Minto in the

eighth edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. The _Letters_ were

first issued in two volumes edited by his daughter and sister-in-law

in 1880. For Dickens's connexion with Kent the following books are

specially valuable:--Robert Langton's _Childhood and Youth of Charles

Dickens_ (1883); Langton's _Dickens and Rochester_ (1880); Thomas

Frost's _In Kent with Charles Dickens_ (1880); F. G. Kitton's _The

Dickens Country_ (1905); H. S. Ward's _The Real Dickens Land_ (1904);

R. Allbut's _Rambles in Dickens Land_ (1899 and 1903). For Dickens's

reading tours see G. Dolby's _Charles Dickens as I knew him_ (1884);

J. T. Fields's _In and Out of Doors with Charles Dickens_ (1876);

Charles Kent's _Dickens as a Reader_ (1872). And for other aspects of

his life see M. Dickens's _My Father as I recall him_ (1897); P. H.

Fitzgerald's _Life of C. Dickens as revealed in his Writings_ (1905),

and _Bozland_ (1895); F. G. Kitton's _Charles Dickens, his Life,

Writings and Personality_, a useful compendium (1902); T. E.

Pemberton's _Charles Dickens and the Stage_, and _Dickens's London_

(1876); F. Miltoun's _Dickens's London_ (1904); Kitton's _Dickens and

his Illustrators_; W. Teignmouth Shore's _Charles Dickens and his

Friends_ (1904 and 1909); B. W. Matz, _Story of Dickens's Life and

Work_ (1904), and review of solutions to _Edwin Drood_ in _The

Bookman_ for March 1908; the recollections of Edmund Yates, Trollope,

James Payn, Lehmann, R. H. Horne, Lockwood and many others. _The

Dickensian_, a magazine devoted to Dickensian subjects, was started in

1905; it is the organ of the Dickens Fellowship, and in a sense of the

Boz Club. _A Dickens Dictionary_ (by G. A. Pierce) appeared in 1872

and 1878; another (by A. J. Philip) in 1909; and a _Dickens

Concordance_ by Mary Williams in 1907. (T. SE.)

DICKINSON, ANNA ELIZABETH (1842- ), American author and lecturer, was

born, of Quaker parentage, at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 28th of

October 1842. She was educated at the Friends' Free School in

Philadelphia, and was for a time a teacher. In 1861 she obtained a

clerkship in the United States mint, but was removed for criticizing

General McClellan at a public meeting. She had gradually become widely

known as an eloquent and persuasive public speaker, one of the first of

her sex to mount the platform to discuss the burning questions of the

hour. Before the Civil War she lectured on anti-slavery topics, during

the war she toured the country on behalf of the Sanitary Commission, and

also lectured on reconstruction, temperance and woman's rights. She

wrote several plays, including _The Crown of Thorns_ (1876); _Mary

Tudor_ (1878), in which she appeared in the title role; _Aurelian_

(1878); and _An American Girl_ (1880), successfully acted by Fanny

Davenport. She also published a novel, _Which Answer?_ (1868); _A Paying

Investment, a Plea for Education_ (1876); and _A Ragged Register of

People, Places and Opinions_ (1879).

DICKINSON, JOHN (1732-1808), American statesman and pamphleteer, was

born in Talbot county, Maryland, on the 8th of November 1732. He removed

with his father to Kent county, Delaware, in 1740, studied under private

tutors, read law, and in 1753 entered the Middle Temple, London.

Returning to America in 1757, he began the practice of law in

Philadelphia, was speaker of the Delaware assembly in 1760, and was a

member of the Pennsylvania assembly in 1762-1765 and again in

1770-1776.[1] He represented Pennsylvania in the Stamp Act Congress

(1765) and in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1776, when he was

defeated owing to his opposition to the Declaration of Independence. He

then retired to Delaware, served for a time as private and later as

brigader-general in the state militia, and was again a member of the

Continental Congress (from Delaware) in 1779-1780. He was president of

the executive council, or chief executive officer, of Delaware in

1781-1782, and of Pennsylvania in 1782-1785, and was a delegate from

Delaware to the Annapolis convention of 1786 and the Federal

Constitutional convention of 1787. Dickinson has aptly been called the

"Penman of the Revolution." No other writer of the day presented

arguments so numerous, so timely and so popular. He drafted the

"Declaration of Rights" of the Stamp Act Congress, the "Petition to the

King" and the "Address to the Inhabitants of Quebec" of the Congress of

1774, and the second "Petition to the King"[2] and the "Articles of

Confederation" of the second Congress. Most influential of all, however,

were _The Letters of a Farmer in Pennsylvania_, written in 1767-1768 in

condemnation of the Townshend Acts of 1767, in which he rejected

speculative natural rights theories and appealed to the common sense of

the people through simple legal arguments. By opposing the Declaration

of Independence, he lost his popularity and was never able entirely to

regain it. As the representative of a small state, he championed the

principle of state equality in the constitutional convention, but was

one of the first to advocate the compromise, which was finally adopted,

providing for equal representation, in one house and proportional

representation in the other. He was probably influenced by Delaware

prejudice against Pennsylvania when he drafted the clause which forbids

the creation of a new state by the junction of two or more states or

parts of states without the consent of the states concerned as well as

of congress. After the adjournment of the convention he defended its

work in a series of letters signed "Fabius," which will bear comparison

with the best of the Federalist productions. It was largely through his

influence that Delaware and Pennsylvania were the first two states to

ratify the Constitution. Dickinson's interests were not exclusively

political. He helped to found Dickinson College (named in his honour) at

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1783, was the first president of its board of

trustees, and was for many years its chief benefactor. He died on the

14th of February 1808 and was buried in the Friends' burial ground in

Wilmington, Del.

See C. J. Stille, _Life and Times of John Dickinson_, and P. L. Ford

(editor), _The Writings of John Dickinson_, in vols. xiii. and xiv.

respectively of the _Memoirs of the Historical Society of

Pennsylvania_ (Philadelphia, 1891 and 1895).