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In December 1833 Dickens’s first published literary work appeared in the Monthly Magazine; it was entitled ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’ (later called ‘Mr Minns and his Cousin’). His first book was Sketches by Boz, and it contained sketches and tales written during 1833 and 1836, including the above ‘Mr Minns’. On display is the Second Series edition, which contained stories not in the First Series of February 1836. Published by John Macrone, the two volume set was illustrated by George Cruikshank, who, along with Dickens, is depicted as a flag waver in this engraved title page. In 1834, Dickens was 22 and a little known Parliamentary reporter; by 1837 he was famous. Sketches by Boz, well-received on publication, did much to establish his reputation.

[Vauxhall Gardens by Day (left) and Sketches by Boz- Second Series (right). Illustrated frontispiece and title page by George Cruikshank, from Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz. Illustrative of Every-day Life, and Every-day People. Second Series.]

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Catherine Dickens (1815-1879), née Hogarth, married Dickens on 2 April 1836. They set up home at 48 Doughty Street (now the Charles Dickens Museum, London) and had ten children. In May 1858, they separated after Catherine discovered Dickens’s infidelities with actress Ellen Ternan. In 1879, just before she died, Catherine gifted letters from Dickens with the note to her daughter Kate: ‘Give these to the British Museum, that the world may know he loved me once’. Catherine was also an author. In 1851, she published under the name ‘Lady Maria Clutterbuck’, 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.

[Page 46-47 from a facsimile of Lady Maria Clutterbuck's What shall we have for Dinner? Satisfactorily answered by numerous bills of fare for from two to eighteen persons.]

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Lady Maria Clutterbuck (pseudonym for Catherine Thomson Dickens)]]>


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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’.

[Page 68-69 from Ada Nisbet's Dickens & Ellen Ternan.]

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William Makepeace Thackeray was not only a major Victorian writer who created works such as Vanity Fair, but he was also an accomplished artist. Indeed, after the suicide of Robert Seymour, Dickens’s first illustrator, Thackeray applied to illustrate Pickwick Papers. He was unsuccessful in this. Initially good friends, Dickens and he had a falling out: the so-called Garrick Club Affair of 1858, which was started by one Edmund Yates. Fortunately, there was reconciliation before Thackeray’s death in December 1863. On display are Dickens’s eulogy of Thackeray in The Cornhill Magazine, and the first serial instalment of Thackeray’s London novel The History of Pendennis.

[Cover of number 1, the November issue, 1848 of William Makepeace Thackeray's The History of Pendennis.]

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William Makepeace Thackeray]]>


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Dickens first met Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), author of Woman in White, in 1851. They became fast friends, collaborating in many projects. Indeed, so close was their relationship, that it has been claimed that Collins was the ‘Dickensian Ampersand’ (Philip V. Allingham, Victorian Web). The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices was one such project, where Collins assumed the identity of Thomas Idle (a born-and-bred idler) and Dickens that of Francis Goodchild (laboriously idle). Originally published in Household Words (October-November 1857), it finally appeared in book form in 1890.

[Illustration, The Ghost's Narrative, by Arthur Layard, opposite page 72 in Charles Dickens's and Wilkie Collins's The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices; No Thoroughfare; The Perils of Certain English Prisoners.]

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Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins]]>



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William Makepeace Thackeray was not only a major Victorian writer who created works such as Vanity Fair, but he was also an accomplished artist. Indeed, after the suicide of Robert Seymour, Dickens’s first illustrator, Thackeray applied to illustrate Pickwick Papers. He was unsuccessful in this. Initially good friends, Dickens and he had a falling out: the so-called Garrick Club Affair of 1858, which was started by one Edmund Yates. Fortunately, there was reconciliation before Thackeray’s death in December 1863. On display are Dickens’s eulogy of Thackeray in The Cornhill Magazine, and the first serial instalment of Thackeray’s London novel The History of Pendennis.

[Page 129 from The Cornhill Magazine, Volume IX, February, 1864. In Memoriam by Charles Dickens.]

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John Forster (1812-1876), was Dickens’s closest friend. He read proofs of many of Dickens’s works, advised him on financial and personal matters, and became Dickens’s literary executor. Known also as ‘Fuz’ or ‘Beadle of the Universe’, Forster was Dickens’s Boswell, producing the first biography, Life of Charles Dickens in 1872. Despite Forster’s suppression of facts about Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan, the book was a great success. This plate by Daniel Maclise in this copy of Forster’s biography portrays Dickens reading The Chimes to his friends in John Forster’s chambers in 1844. Dickens was introduced to Forster by the novelist William H. Ainsworth.

[At 58, Lincolns Inn Fields, Monday the 2nd of December 1844 by Daniel Maclise, opposite page 242 in John Forster's The Life of Charles Dickens.]

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When Dickens and Thomas Carlyle met in 1840, it was the beginning of a life-long friendship. The gruff Scot held a contrary opinion on Dickens, the so-called ‘entertainer’: ‘Dickens had not written anything which would be found of much use in solving the problems of life.’ After Dickens’s death, Carlyle proclaimed: ‘the good, the gentle, ever noble Dickens, - every inch of him an Honest Man!’ Dickens claimed to have read the essayist’s The French Revolution 500 times, and used it as a basis for his own A Tale of Two Cities. This copy was once Truby King’s and is annotated by him.

[Page 304-305 from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1831); Lectures on Heroes (1840).]

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Barnaby Rudge, Dickens’s fifth novel, centred round the Gordon ‘No Popery’ Riots of 1780 and the murder of Reuben Haredale. Originally planned to be his first novel and entitled Gabriel Varden, the Locksmith of London, it was put aside because of the success of Pickwick. An historical novel in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott, Barnaby Rudge first appeared in serial form in Master Humphrey’s Clock from February to November 1841. Maria Beadnell, Dickens’s first love, was the original of the flirtatious Dolly Varden.

[Chapter the First from Charles Dickens's ‘Barnaby Rudge’, in Master Humphrey’s Clock. 1st edition. Vol. II.]

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Dickens’s concern for children, their welfare, and parenting crystalized in his first Christmas book: A Christmas Carol. The genesis of the story, which features Ebenezer ‘Bah! Humbug!’ Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, and the Ghosts, arose through Dickens’s desire to strike a ‘sledge-hammer blow…on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’. And Christmas conviviality was not a new theme. He had delved into Xmas cheer at Wardles’s Manor Farm at Dingley Dell in Pickwick Papers, Part X. ‘The Ghost of Marley’ by E. N. Ellis is on display in this dramatized version of Dickens’s classic tale.

[The Ghost of Marley, illustration by E.N. Ellis opposite page 12 in C. Z. Barnett's A Christmas Carol, Or, The Miser’s Warning: A Drama in 2 acts, Adapted from Charles Dickens’ Story.]

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]]> Charles Dickens was the second of eight children to John and Elizabeth Dickens, née Barrow. Financial mismanagement resulted in John being imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison. One consequence of this was that the twelve-year old Dickens was taken out of school and made to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory, where he spent ten hours a day, Monday through Saturday, pasting labels onto pots of blacking. This experience haunted Dickens for years, and many of his novels like Dombey and Son and David Copperfield reflect his concern for destitute children, orphans and abandonment. Here he is in happier times, with a portrait painted by E. Lawn, circa 1870. The usual flourish that ended most of Dickens’s letters is depicted opposite.

[Letter written by Charles Dickens in Charles Dickens Papers 1845-1881.]

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Charles Dickens was the second of eight children to John and Elizabeth Dickens, née Barrow. Financial mismanagement resulted in John being imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison. One consequence of this was that the twelve-year old Dickens was taken out of school and made to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory, where he spent ten hours a day, Monday through Saturday, pasting labels onto pots of blacking. This experience haunted Dickens for years, and many of his novels like Dombey and Son and David Copperfield reflect his concern for destitute children, orphans and abandonment. Here he is in happier times, with a portrait painted by E. Lawn, circa 1870. The usual flourish that ended most of Dickens’s letters is depicted opposite.

[Portrait of Charles Dickens by E. Lawn from Charles Dickens Papers 1845-1881.]

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Dickens’s concern for children, their welfare, and parenting crystalized in his first Christmas book: A Christmas Carol. The genesis of the story, which features Ebenezer ‘Bah! Humbug!’ Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, and the Ghosts, arose through Dickens’s desire to strike a ‘sledge-hammer blow…on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’. And Christmas conviviality was not a new theme. He had delved into Xmas cheer at Wardles’s Manor Farm at Dingley Dell in Pickwick Papers, Part X. ‘The Ghost of Marley’ by E. N. Ellis is on display in this dramatized version of Dickens’s classic tale.

[Title page from A Christmas Carol or, The Miser's Warning. A Drama in 2 Acts adapted from Charles Dickens' Story by C. Z. Barnett. Wood engravings by E. N. Ellis.]

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By her unceasing care of the wounded and sick in the English camps at Crimea, Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) became known as the ‘Lady of the Lamp’. Back in England, she published her reform measures in Notes on Hospitals (1859) and Notes on Nursing (1859), and in 1860 established a school for nurses at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. With her friend Elizabeth Gaskell, Nightingale endeavoured to improve the social and economic situation of those less fortunate in Britain. She knew Dickens, and distributed his books to nurses and soldiers. She also worked with him on the Committee of the Association for Improving Workhouse Infirmaries.

[Copy of a painting of Florence Nightingale, ‘The Lady of the Lamp’.]

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By February 1838, Charles Dickens had begun Nicholas Nickleby, his third novel. Published serially between April 1838 and October 1839, he was paid £150 per number, with a bonus offered of £1500 on completion. The soon-to-be-more-famous Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’) illustrated the novel. There was fieldwork involved. In 1838, both men travelled to Yorkshire to look at schools; Dotheboys Hall was the reconstituted literary result. This first book edition also contains Daniel Maclise’s engraved portrait of Dickens as well as coloured plates by ‘Peter Palette’, a pseudonym for Thomas Onwhyn, a later Punch illustrator.

[The internal economy of Dotheboys Hall. An illustration by Hablot Knight Browne in Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.]

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Reproduced from Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life, this map shows various places in Central London associated with Dickens. Note Warren’s Blacking Factory, in the bottom right-hand corner, where Dickens worked as a twelve year old; and Coldbath Field Prison, in the top right-hand corner, where Dickens was a frequent visitor, though obviously not as an inmate.

[Dickens in Central London in Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life.]

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]]> Mr Squeers by Thomas Onwhyn from Charles Dickens's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby]]> Charles Dickens]]> ]]> The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, shows Wackford Squeers admonishing one of his unfortunate charges.]]> Charles Dickens]]> The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.]]> Charles Dickens]]> The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.]]> Charles Dickens]]> The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.]]> Charles Dickens]]>