Book excerpt: In Dickens's lifetime, and for a generation or so after, Edmund Hodgson Yates and George Augustus Sala were the best known and most successful of his "young men" - the budding writers who acknowledged him as their guide and mentor and whose literary careers the publicity and privately fostered. The book considers their personal and literary relationships with Dickens, with each other, and with other writers of the period, Bohemian and "respectable", including Yates's arch-enemy, his post-office colleague Anthony Trollope. But it also demonstrates that their life and writings - their fiction, private letters and occasional essays in verse and drama, as well as their already recognised contributions to the development of the "new journalism" - are interesting and historically illuminating in their own right, not merely pale reflections of the glory of greater writers. Extensive use is made of previously unpublished material.