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INTRODUCTION
What I have most enjoyed in this labour of love has been the expressing in another form and through another medium than those used by my fellow-craftsmen, the wonderful velvet blacks, soft vapoury skies, and streaming silver-washed streets of London—an easy matter for any enthusiast, for London is charcoal, and charcoal is London.
And so I tender to you, my readers, in all humility not another book about Mr. Dickens with illustrations by the author, but a book of illustrations with some explanatory extracts from the Master's text, padded with some experiences of my own.
F. Hopkinson Smith.
Exchange Place,
New York, August, 1914.
vii
