Dickens Charles - The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens

Edited by
JENNY HARTLEY

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In the selection, introduction, and editorial matter Jenny Hartley 2012

Letters Oxford University Press 2012

A Chronology of Charles Dickens: Elizabeth Brennan 1999

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First published 2012

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Acknowledgements

This selection owes its existence to the Pilgrim Trustees, and I am grateful to Georgina Naylor at the Pilgrim Trust. The original Pilgrim Edition benefited from the generosity of the British Academy with funding, and from the subsequent adoption of the edition as an official research project. Mark Dickens has been supportive on behalf of the family. The illustration in the letter to Daniel Maclise of February 13 1840 is from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and America Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations, reproduced by permission of Mark Dickens.

I am especially grateful to Michael Slater for his generous interest and unstinting support; and for his expert advice and judgement. It is a pleasure to record my thanks to him. The knowledge, assistance, and kindness of Angus Easson and Margaret Brown, both Pilgrim editors, have been invaluable. I would also like to thank Malcolm Andrews and David Paroissien; Joan Dicks and the Dickens Fellowship; Florian Schweizer at the Charles Dickens Museum, and Nick Hartley for his attentive and careful eye. At Oxford University Press, Jacqueline Baker has been the ideal editor. I am also grateful to Ariane Petit, Jackie Pritchard, and Fiona Vlemmiks for guiding the book expertly through to publication. It is a great privilege to have had the index made by Douglas Matthews.

The selection is respectfully dedicated to the editors, assistant editors, and associate editors of the British Academy Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens.

Specimens of signatures

1 .July 1832. 2. November 1834. 3. November 1835. 4. March 1836. 5 .October 1836. 6 .April 1837. 7 .March 1838. 8. November 1839. 9 . August 1840. 10. January 1842. 11. November 1842. 12. April 1846. 13. June 1847. 14. July 1861

Contents

Introduction

Had it been up to Dickens, this selection of his letters would not have appeared. He was himself a great destroyer of letters, especially towards the end of his life. Yesterday, he wrote in September 1860, I burnt, in the field at Gads Hill, the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years. On the other hand, he delighted in the affection which he fostered between himself and his readers; he built on that close relationship in his public readings, and he dispatched reams of letters to his friend John Forster, knowing that he was to be his biographer. So perhaps he would have given a back-handed blessing to this selection.

Dickens claimed to receive three or four score letters every day.

The 14,000 surviving letters, addressed to 2,500 known correspondents and over 200 unknown correspondents, have been painstakingly collected, dated, annotated, and published between 1965 and 2002, in the magisterial twelve-volume Pilgrim Edition, from which this selection is taken. Some of the 14,000 are tantalizing ghosts: letters which exist only as a mention in another letter, or a fragment in a sale catalogue. Some are mere notes of acceptance, invitation, or refusal. Some run to many pages. In his letter-writing alone, George Gissing judged, Dickens did a lifes literary work. All bear the stamp of the Inimitable.

Letters give us a particular version of a life: the freshness of first impressions, as Forster characterizes Dickenss letters from America in 1842 when comparing them This is of course what we value his letters for today: that quality of life lived on the hoof (sometimes literally so for Dickens), which the letters bring us with such immediacy.

In reducing twelve volumes to one, and the 14,000 to 450, the main criterion is to show Dickenss range as a letter writer. Readers who enjoy his fiction, his journalism, and his travel writing will appreciate his gifts in this fourth genre. On display here, notably in this condensed version, is the epistolary as the genre of exuberance. We see at first hand his indefatigable labours as a magazine editor, his exasperation with business arrangements (not always to his credit), his close involvement with philanthropic projects, his responses to issues of the day such as public hangings, and his alertness as a traveller. We can feel the warmth of his friendships, the richness of his social life, and, throughout, his pleasure in writing, if only (and sometimes especially) to an audience of one. In this selection one letter represents many more. A good example is the mass of letters concerning amateur theatricals. Dickens took sole responsibility for all the organization, which meant choosing the plays, distributing parts, cajoling cast members, and arranging rehearsals; ordering costumes, props, and scenery; booking theatres, railway carriages, and hotel rooms. I write 100 letters a day, about these plays, he grumbled about this self-inflicted chore. I am fully persuaded that an amateur manager has more correspondence than the Home Secretary.