In the same year he separated from his wife, and consequent upon the controversy which arose thereupon he brought Household Words to an end, and started All the Year Round, in which appeared A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1860-61). Our Mutual Friend came out in numbers (1864-65).  D. was now in the full tide of his readings, and decided to give a course of them in America.  Thither accordingly he went in the end of 1867, returning in the following May.  He had a magnificent reception, and his profits amounted to L20,000; but the effect on his health was such that he was obliged, on medical advice, finally to abandon all appearances of the kind.  In 1869 he began his last work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which was interrupted by his death from an apoplectic seizure on June 8, 1870.

One of D.’s most marked characteristics is the extraordinary wealth of his invention as exhibited in the number and variety of the characters introduced into his novels.  Another, especially, of course, in his entire works, is his boundless flow of animal spirits.  Others are his marvellous keenness of observation and his descriptive power.  And the English race may well, with Thackeray, be “grateful for the innocent laughter, and the sweet and unsullied pages which the author of David Copperfield gives to [its] children.”  On the other hand, his faults are obvious, a tendency to caricature, a mannerism that often tires, and almost disgusts, fun often forced, and pathos not seldom degenerating into mawkishness.  But at his best how rich and genial is the humour, how tender often the pathos.  And when all deductions are made, he had the laughter and tears of the English-speaking world at command for a full generation while he lived, and that his spell still works is proved by a continuous succession of new editions.

SUMMARY.—­B. 1812, parliamentary reporter c. 1835, pub. Sketches by Boz 1836, Pickwick 1837-39, and his other novels almost continuously until his death, visited America 1841, started Household Words 1849, and All the Year Round 1858, when also he began his public readings, visiting America again in 1867, d. 1870.

Life by John Foster (1872), Letters ed. by Miss Hogarth (1880-82).  Numerous Lives and Monographs by Sala, F.T.  Marzials (Great Writers Series), A.W.  Ward (Men of Letters Series), F.G.  Kitton, G.K.  Chesterton, etc.

DIGBY, SIR KENELM (1603-1665).—­Miscellaneous writer, b. near Newport Pagnell, s. of Sir Everard D., one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, was ed. at Oxf., travelled much, and was engaged in sea-fighting.  Brought up first as a Romanist, then as a Protestant, he in 1636 joined the Church of Rome.  During the Civil War he was active on the side of the King, and on the fall of his cause was for a time banished.  He was the author of several books on religious and quasi-scientific subjects, including one on the Choice of a Religion, on the Immortality of the Soul, Observations on Spenser’s Faery Queen, and a criticism on Sir T. Browne’s Religio Medici.  He also wrote a Discourse on Vegetation, and one On the Cure of Wounds by means of a sympathetic powder which he imagined he had discovered.