... There was a great demand for engravings of his portrait, and his head was being modeled by an admiring sculptor.This was Dickens nearly halfway through his life: he was twenty-eight in February 1840, and had another thirty years ahead of him. He was living in a country that had been at peace for a quarter of a century. There had been no foreign wars, and no revolution at home, partly thanks to the Reform Bill of 1832, passed under the old King, William IV, in which parliamentary constituencies were redrawn and the electorate widened, cautiously. But the courts and alleys of London remained squalid with poverty, overcrowding and disease, and the rich in their great houses were unshaken Railways were changing the habits of the nation more than votes, and railway stations at Euston and Paddington already connected London to the north and the West Country.