Dickens, like all great authors, had a tendency to underestimate the
value of his most popular book. At any rate, it is certainly on
record that he thought considerably more of some of his other works
than he did of the immortal Pickwick. But The Pickwick Papers has
maintained its place through generations, and retains it to-day, as
the most popular book in our language--a book unexampled in our
literature. There are persons who make a yearly custom of reading
it; others who can roll off pages of it from memory; scores who can
answer any meticulous question in an examination of its contents; and
a whole army ready and waiting to correct any misquotation that may
appear in print from its pages. All its curiosities, lapses,
oddities, anachronisms, slips and misprints have been discovered by
commentators galore, and the number of books it has brought into
existence is stupendous.

What the secret of its popularity is would take a volume to make
manifest; but in a word, one might attribute it to its vividness of
reality--to the fact that every character seems to be a real living
being, with whose minute peculiarities we are made familiar in a
singularly droll and happy manner. With each we become close friends
on first acquaintance, and as episode succeeds episode the friendship
deepens, with no thought that our friends are mere imaginary creatures
of the author's brain.

It does not matter if the adventures of these amiable and jovial beings
are boisterously reckless at times, or if they indulge in impossible
probabilities. Their high spirited gaiety and inexhaustible fun and