]]> L'Eclipse in 1868.]]> André Gill]]> ]]> Dickens died on 9 June 1870 as he worked on the final pages of the sixth instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. This incomplete novel, with no solution to the plot, has meant that Edwin Drood is one of the best unfinished mystery stories in literature. Even Dickens raised questions with his note on the title: ‘Dead? Or Alive?’ Over the years many have offered endings, including Howard Duffield’s proposal that John Jasper was associated with the Thugee cult of Kali and the murder was a ritual killing for revenge. Charles Alston Collins, brother of Wilkie, designed the cover for the parts. The illustrations within were done by Luke Fildes, who passed Dickens’s test of being able to paint ‘pretty ladies’. The perceptive Wilkie Collins described Edwin Drood as ‘the melancholy effort of a worn-out brain.’ The complete parts and the first book edition are on display.

[Cover of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Number 1, April 1870.]

]]>
Charles Dickens]]>
Dickens died on 9 June 1870 as he worked on the final pages of the sixth instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. This incomplete novel, with no solution to the plot, has meant that Edwin Drood is one of the best unfinished mystery stories in literature. Even Dickens raised questions with his note on the title: ‘Dead? Or Alive?’ Over the years many have offered endings, including Howard Duffield’s proposal that John Jasper was associated with the Thugee cult of Kali and the murder was a ritual killing for revenge. Charles Alston Collins, brother of Wilkie, designed the cover for the parts. The illustrations within were done by Luke Fildes, who passed Dickens’s test of being able to paint ‘pretty ladies’. The perceptive Wilkie Collins described Edwin Drood as ‘the melancholy effort of a worn-out brain.’ The complete parts and the first book edition are on display.

[The Mystery of Edwin Drood Chapter 1- The Dawn (right) and illustration by Samuel Luke Fildes opposite entitled In the Court from Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1st edition.]

]]>
Charles Dickens ]]>
For one year, from July 1844 to July 1845, Dickens and his family lived in Genoa. Based on letters to his friend Forster, Pictures from Italy describes the travels in the ‘good old shabby devil of a coach’ through France, and then to Genoa via Marseilles. While residing in an Albaro villa, and then ‘Palazzo Peschiere’, he also visited Venice, Naples, Rome (the Colosseum: ‘most stupendous and awful’), Pisa, and Pompeii, where he climbed Mt. Vesuvius and looked ‘into the flaming bowels of the mountain’. Conscious of charges of anti-Catholicism, he reminded readers that Pictures from Italy was ‘a series of faint reflections – mere shadows in the water.’ Here are the first Bradbury and first Tauchnitz editions of 1846.

[Page 10 and 11 of Charles Dickens's Pictures from Italy.]

]]>
Charles Dickens]]>
]]> During the Victorian period, the general populace poured in to watch melodramas, burlesques, comedies, and the serious in theatres and music halls up and down the country. Dickens himself loved the theatre. In fact, as a young man he secured an audition at the Covent Garden theatre to become an actor. A bad cold postponed the meeting, and the rest…as they say, is history. He wrote plays, acted in them, stage managed them, and his popular readings were but mesmerizing theatre. Doré’s illustration depicts the bright lights on the boards, but the audience seems somewhat subdued.

[Page 160 and 161 of Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold's London: A Pilgrimage.]

]]>
Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold]]>
]]> 'Everybody is miserable…about the Crimea. I have an old belief that our Political Aristocracy will ruin this land at last, and altogether London looks gloomy.’ So wrote Dickens to Mrs Gaskell, on 3 February 1855, on the debacle that was the Crimean War (1853 to 1856), a conflict involving the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France, and Sardinia, against the Russians. While acknowledging the need for a balance of power in the area, Dickens railed against gross military and administrative incompetence; the decimation of the Light Brigade being the pinnacle of that mismanagement. To him, the War was a major distraction from the real problems at home. Alexander Kingslake’s informative volume depicts the position of the heavy cavalry, and a facsimile of Lord Cardigan’s understanding of troop positions on that fateful day (25 October 1854).

[Plate 3 by J. Jobbins in Alexander W. Kinglake's The Invasion of the Crimea Vol. IV, opposite page 152.]

]]>
Alexander W. Kinglake]]>
]]> Dickens must have been well satisfied with reader responses to Dombey and Son, which he began in Lausanne, continued in Paris, and finished in Brighton, Broadstairs and London. The first number sold 30,000, an increase over Martin Chuzzlewhit, but below sales of Nicholas Nickleby. He netted £2200 for the first six months, including his £100 per month payment from the publishers. According to the reckoning of his friend Forster, he had finally achieved financial security. Like Martin Chuzzlewhit, the book had a tight planned structure; unlike Chuzzlewhit, it dealt with the theme of pride.

[Title page and frontispiece (by Phiz) from Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son.]

]]>
Charles Dickens]]>
]]> Despite her mother’s disapproval of novels, Queen Victoria read Oliver Twist and found it so ‘excessively interesting’ that she pressed it on the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who responded with: ‘It’s all among Workhouses, and Coffin Makers, and Pickpockets…I don’t like that low debasing style’. In 1840 Victoria married Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Dickens created a love fantasy over her, getting back privately at Albert by calling him a ‘German sassage [sausage]’ from ‘Saxe Humbug and Go-to-her’. On 9 March 1870, an ailing Dickens finally had a 90 minute audience with the Queen, who thanked him for the loan of some Civil War photographs, and discussed household matters such as ‘the cost of butchers’ meat, and bread’. Victoria found Dickens ‘very agreeable, with a pleasant voice and manner.’

[Page 4 and 5 from The Illustrated London News Record of the Glorious Reign of Queen Victoria.]

]]>
___]]>
]]> When touring America in 1842, Dickens met Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It was Longfellow who thought the creator of Oliver and Nicholas Nickleby had ‘a slight dash of the Dick Swiveller about him’. Their trans-Atlantic friendship continued, and when Longfellow visited London in 1843, Dickens took him on a night tour of the slums. While staying with Dickens, Longfellow (to George Slater) captured an evocative moment at Devonshire Terrace: ‘I write this from Dickens’s study… The raven croaks in the garden; and the ceaseless roar of London fills my ears.’ Here is Longfellow’s well known Song of Hiawatha.

[Page 202 and 203, The Song of Hiawatha, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Poetical Works. ]

]]>
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]]>



]]>
In early March 1836, Dickens signed a contract with the fledging firm of Chapman and Hall, who gambled on serial publication of Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s first novel. He was to receive £14 for each 12,000-word instalment. Only 1,000 of the first number were printed; by late November 1837, 40,000 copies were being sold. The appearance of Sam Weller clinched Dickens’s reputation, and Pickwick Papers was a runaway bestseller. This first book edition of the twenty instalments contains illustrations by Robert Seymour, who completed them up to the second number; R. W. Buss, who was an interim illustrator; and then 20 year old Hablot Browne, who would become Dickens’s most consistent artistic collaborator.

[Title page and frontispiece from Charles Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. 1st bound edition. Illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz).]

]]>
Charles Dickens]]>


]]>
Angela Burdett Coutts (1814-1906), a philanthropic millionairess, became friends with Dickens about 1840. He undertook research for Coutts and began advising her on various charities in which she was interested. In the letter displayed, Dickens recounts his visit to a Ragged School in Saffron Hill, a notorious slum area of London and home to the fictional Fagin. Ragged Schools were set up in an attempt to bring education to the street children of London while also providing them with some food and clothing. Dickens praised the efforts of the teachers but was shocked by the parlous state of the children and advised Coutts that the school was ‘an experiment most worthy of [her] charitable hand’. Dickens and Coutts went on to other charity projects and set up Urania Cottage, a ‘Home for Fallen Women’, in May 1847.

[Copy of photograph of Angela Burdett Coutts. ]

]]>
___]]>



]]>
This delightful sketch of (right to left) Dickens, his wife Catherine, and sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth was executed by Dickens’s friend Daniel Maclise. Catherine became Dickens’s wife, and Georgina became Dickens’s household organiser, and sided with him during the separation scandal. One Hogarth is missing: Mary, who moved into Dickens’s household in 1836. A year later, this ‘young, beautiful and good’ girl died in Dickens’s arms. Many scholars have suggested that Mary was the model for Little Nell, in The Old Curiosity Shop.

[Copy of original from Forster Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.]

]]>
Daniel Maclise]]>

]]>
What shall we have for dinner? Satisfactorily answered by numerous bills of fare for from two to eighteen persons (1851), a cookbook that was very popular, going through several editions.]]> Daniel Maclise]]>



]]>
Langley and Belch published their London map in 1812, the year of Dickens’s birth. The City of London is highlighted in pink, and placed around the outer frame are vignettes that feature well-known London landmarks.

[Langley and Belch’s New Map of London (facsimile).]

]]>
___]]>

]]>
George Cruikshank illustrated Dickens’s Oliver Twist. In this plate, Oliver Twist has just been shot by Mr Giles, the butler, in the bungled burglary of the Maylie home. Mr Brittles stands beside Mr Giles and Bill Sikes looks on through the window.

[The Burglary by George Cruikshank, frontispiece from Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist; or the Parish Boy’s Progress. ]

]]>
Charles Dickens]]>


]]>
Looking suspiciously like Father Christmas, the Ghost of Christmas Present is Ebenezer Scrooge’s third visitor in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

[Scrooge's Third Visitor. An illustration by John Leech from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. ]

]]>
Charles Dickens]]>
]]> The Charles Dickens Originals.]]> Edwin Pugh]]> François Courvoisier cut the throat of his master, Lord William Russell, and was sentenced to hang outside Newgate Prison on 6 July 1840. Dickens attended the execution along with 40,000 others, including Thackeray. Although Dickens attended four public executions during his lifetime, he disliked them as spectacles. On capital punishment, he was ambivalent, as expressed in a letter written in 1864: ‘I should be glad to abolish both [public executions and capital punishment] if I knew what to do with the Savages of civilization. As I do not, I would rid Society of them, when they shed blood, in a very solemn manner but would bar out the present audience.’ A full account of the Courvoisier case is in volume II of Chronicles of Crime (1887), which is superbly illustrated by ‘Phiz’.

[Heading from article regarding Courvoisier's hanging for murder, page 581 from Camden Pelham's The Chronicles of Crime; Or, The New Newgate Calendar.]

]]>
Camden Pelham [pseud.]]]>

]]>
Venue: Manchester Free Trade Hall; dates: 21, 22, and 24 August 1857; protagonists - Nelly (18); Charles (45). ‘Nelly’ was the actress Ellen Lawless Ternan (1839–1914), who became Dickens’s love interest after he saw her perform on stage in the Wilkie Collins play The Frozen Deep. Conscious of public opinion, their relationship was known to only a few friends. Dickens discretely supported Ternan, and she occasionally accompanied him on his travels. In 1876, after Dickens’s death, she married George Wharton Robinson, a clergyman twelve years her junior. On display is a photograph copy of Ternan, c.1875, as well as a reprint of Dickens’s Will where he leaves her ‘£1000 free of legacy duty’.

[Photograph of Ellen Ternan, c. 1875.]

]]>
___]]>
]]> Dickens began his career as a professional reader in 1858, after many private readings to family, friends, and charity groups. For each performance he condensed the text, with ‘The Trial from Pickwick’ being the most popular at 164 readings; ‘A Christmas Carol’ was performed 127 times. And much like Miriam Margolyes’s ‘Dickens’s Women’, his was a one-person show, where he played different characters in different voices. Some scholars have suggested that the strain of these performances hastened his death.

[Copy of an engraving of Charles Dickens at his reading desk for his final performance on 15 March 1870. ]

]]>
___]]>
Dickens’s George Silverman’s Explanation, a story in nine chapters, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly between January and March 1868, when Dickens was in America on a reading tour. This dark tale was one of the last pieces of fiction written by him. It carries a very bleak message: ‘the lesson that good produces evil, that virtue goes unrewarded, that hypocrisy goes undetected, and that we are all helpless prisoners of our environment and our personality’ (Harry Stone). Even Dickens was struck by it: ‘Upon myself, it has made the strongest impression of reality and originality!! And I feel as if I had read something (by somebody else) which I should never get out of my head!!’

[Page 3 featuring the Third Chapter of Charles Dickens's George Silverman's Explanation. ]

]]>
Charles Dickens]]>

]]>
The first number of Dickens’s periodical Household Words appeared on Saturday, 30 March 1850. This much-vaunted ‘comrade and friend of many thousands of people’ was the joint property of Dickens (one-half), publishers Bradbury and Evans (one-fourth), W. H. Hills, and John Forster (one-eighth each), and cost two pence per issue. Many of the 3000 articles were unsigned, and designed, as stated in ‘A Preliminary Word’, ‘to show to all, that in all familiar things, even in those which are repellent on the surface, there is Romance enough, if we will find it out.’ Flagging sales saw Dickens serialize Hard Times within its pages. He discontinued his ‘conducting’ of this weekly on 28 May 1859, incorporating it into All The Year Round.

[Heading of Charles Dickens's Household Words, Volume 1, page 1 dated Saturday March 30, 1850.]

]]>
Charles Dickens]]>


]]>
Dickens’s George Silverman’s Explanation, a story in nine chapters, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly between January and March 1868, when Dickens was in America on a reading tour. This dark tale was one of the last pieces of fiction written by him. It carries a very bleak message: ‘the lesson that good produces evil, that virtue goes unrewarded, that hypocrisy goes undetected, and that we are all helpless prisoners of our environment and our personality’ (Harry Stone). Even Dickens was struck by it: ‘Upon myself, it has made the strongest impression of reality and originality!! And I feel as if I had read something (by somebody else) which I should never get out of my head!!’

[Title page of Charles Dickens's George Silverman's Explanation; edited by Harry Stone; illustrated by Irving Block]

]]>
Charles Dickens]]>

]]>
In 1858, Catherine and Charles Dickens legally separated. The scandal surrounding the event affected his relationship with Bradbury and Evans, who refused to publish his explanation of his separation in Punch. Annoyed, Dickens turned back to Chapman and Hall and began All The Year Round, a new weekly again priced at twopence. The first issue of 30 April 1859 carried his serialized novels A Tale of Two Cities (seen here) and Great Expectations. In later issues, works by Wilkie Collins, Bulwer Lytton, and Elizabeth Gaskell featured.

[Title page from Charles Dickens's All the Year Round, Volume 1, from April 30 to October 22 1859. Numbers 1 to 26.]

]]>
Charles Dickens]]>
]]> There were amusements aplenty for London’s townfolk: boat races, dog fights, the pleasure gardens (Vauxhall and Cremorne), the zoo, museums, railway travel, concerts, opera, music halls (the Alhambra), and the circus. For those eager to extend their horse’s promenade on Rotten Row, Hyde Park, to a gallop, there was the rural sport of deer, wild boar, or fox hunting. Whether Dickens rode regularly or not, he certainly provided a memorable definition of a horse in Hard Times, using Bitzer’s response to Thomas Gradgrind: ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth’.

[Page 497 and facing page from Delabere P. Blaine's An Encyclopaedia of Rural Sports, Chapter VI. Includes illustrations entitled "Gone Away! Gone Away!" and "Full Cry".]

]]>
Delabere P. Blaine]]>