‘My Master in Letters’

Abstract

[Writing a few days after Dickens’s death, Sala remarks on how familiar and recognisable a figure his was; there were] few last week who would have been unable to point out the famous novelist, with his thought-lined face, his grizzled beard, his wondrous searching eyes, his bluff presence and swinging gait as, head aloft, he strode now through crowded streets, looking seemingly neither to the right nor the left, but of a surety looking at and into every thing — now at the myriad aspects of London life, the ever-changing raree-show, the endless round-about, the infinite kaleidoscope of wealth and pauperism, of happiness and misery, of good and evil in this Babylon; — now over the pleasant meads and breezy downs which stretched around his modest Kentish demesne hard by the hoary tower of Rochester.