_Taken from the Legal Agreement re "Pickwick."_]

[Illustration: AGE 29.
_From a Drawing by Alfred Count D'Orsay._]

No. 13 is a copy of a very famous signature: the original is on a great
parchment called "Deed of License Assignment and Covenants respecting a
Work called 'The Pickwick Papers,'" and which, after a preamble,
contains the words: "Whereas the said Charles Dickens is the Author of a
Book or Work intituled 'The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,'
which has been recently printed and published in twenty parts or
numbers," etc. It is probable that the fact of the seal being placed
between _Charles_ and _Dickens_ prevented the flourish which almost
invariably accompanied his signatures on business documents; the marked
enlargement of this signature takes the place of the flourish, and shows
an unconscious emphasis of the _ego_. It would be almost unreasonable
for us to expect that so impressionable a man, who was also feeling his
power and fame, could abstain from showing outward signs of his own
consciousness of abnormal success. Yet, in the private letters of
Dickens, the simple "C. D." is very frequent; a few examples of it are
given in this article, and their present number in no way represents the
numerical relation of these simple signatures to the more "showy" ones.
It may at once be said that this point of difference is alike
interesting to the student of gesture and to the student of Dickens's
character. He was certainly a very able man of business, and the wording
of his "business" letters fully bears out the idea conveyed by his
"business" signature--so to speak--that Dickens was fully aware of his
own powers, and that, quite fairly, he did not omit to impress the fact
upon other people when he thought fit. Both the wording and the
signature of many of his private letters are simple and unostentatious