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engagement. He gave time to teach Catherine’s younger brother shorthand, and worried about finding a job for his own brother Fred. No wonder he sometimes collapsed.
    With
Sketches by Boz
about to appear on 8 February, he had to send out review copies to people who might have an influence on its reception: Lord Stanley, who knew him as a reporter, Charles Dilke, now editor of the
Athenaeum
(who had noticed him at the blacking factory), and John Easthope, his imperious boss. Dickens and Macrone prepared for publication together harmoniously and were on increasingly close and friendly terms: Macrone was ‘My dear Sir’ until publication day, thereafter ‘My Dear Macrone’. Dickens wrote a consoling letter when Macrone’s baby son died, and invited him to be best man at his wedding. Macrone supplied Dickens with a copy of
Hints on Etiquette
, which he had asked for, no doubt in preparation for married life; and obligingly took Fred Dickens into his accounts department in the summer. Macrone was ambitious and enterprising. He had arrived in London from unknown parts – possibly the Isle of Man – cut a few corners by borrowing money from an older woman, enough to set himself up in an office in St James’s Square, and ditched her to marry another woman, an American. 2 He was full of ideas: he commissioned busts of famous men to set up around his office, made by an eccentric Scottish sculptor, Angus Fletcher, who became a friend of Dickens and made the first bust of him in 1839. 3 He got Turner to illustrate
Paradise Lost
, and he ran over to Paris to try to sign up Victor Hugo. He and Dickens worked hard together to get the
Sketches
noticed and puffed in advance, with triumphant results. It was well reviewed: George Hogarth praised Dickens in the
Chronicle
as ‘a close and acute observer of character and manners’, and for showing ‘the vices and wretchedness’ of London life, and there was praise everywhere for its wit, truth and descriptive powers. It sold well and went into a second edition in the summer. Both Macrone and Dickens had every reason to be pleased with their collaboration.

     
    Dickens smoking in the office of his publisher Macrone: Thackeray’s sketch, showing himself and another writer, Mahoney, standing.
     
    While this was going on, a second publisher appeared at Dickens’s door one evening in February with a proposal. This was William Hall, who had set up in business with his friend Edward Chapman in the Strand, at No. 186, in 1830. Hall asked Dickens if he would write sketches to go with drawings by a young artist, Robert Seymour, who specialized in sporting scenes, and was keen to make a series of plates showing the adventures of a fishing club. Dickens recognized Hall as the man who, in December 1833, had sold him a copy of his own first story, just published in his
Monthly
magazine, and both felt that this was a good omen. 4 Dickens said he was interested, but hoped for a slightly wider brief. Hall was a good businessman and agreed to this at once, offered £14 for each monthly episode and added that the fee might rise if the series did well. With this Dickens was happy. There was no formal agreement, just a letter. In such an easy-going way began a relationship that made Chapman & Hall rich and helped to establish Dickens’s supremacy among the novelists of the nineteenth century.
    Dickens saw that the money offered would allow him to keep a wife and live comfortably. He already had an idea for a comic character, Mr Pickwick, a rich, retired businessman with a taste for good food and a tendency to drink too much, an innocent, playful and benevolent – he would be well described by W. H. Auden as ‘a pagan god wandering through the world imperviously’ – and with a group of younger friends with whom he sets off on modest travels through southern England. He also thought he would vary the narrative of his adventures by inserting separate, unconnected short stories at intervals. He began