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.]
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.]
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.]
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 of Charles Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. 1st bound edition.]
While submitting contributions to the Monthly Magazine, Dickens formed his pen-name – ‘Boz’. He juggled parliamentary reporting (he was adept at shorthand) with creative writing, submitting additional ‘sketches’ to the Evening Chronicle, edited by his future father-in-law George Hogarth. Dickens was an excellent observer, and his Sketches by Boz include memorable descriptions of people and places, especially of London. ‘Thoughts about People’ is but one, ably illustrated by George Cruikshank, the ‘modern Hogarth’, who was equally secretive about his personal life (unbeknown to all, he had a mistress by whom he fathered 11 illegitimate children).
[Thoughts about People. Illustration by George Cruikshank, opposite page 90 from Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz. Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People.]
The heavy writing schedule that Dickens faced during the creation of Oliver Twist necessitated textual alterations to later printings. The most noticeable was the toning down of anti-Semitic references, especially to the character Fagin, based on the real-life criminal Ikey Solomon. Dickens had referred to Fagin as the ‘merry old gentleman’ or simply the ‘Jew’; in later editions, the mention of ‘Jew’ is much reduced. Oliver Twist is famous for revealing Dickens’s traumatic experience in the Blacking Factory. It not only contains unforgettable characters such as Mr Bumble, the Artful Dodger, Sikes and Nancy, but also his satirical swipes at the workhouse system, and the legal system that administered it. Here Cruikshank’s Fagin awaits his fate.
[Fagin in the condemned Cell. Illustration by George Cruikshank facing page 216 in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. 1st edition, 3rd issue.]
The writing of Nicholas Nickleby overlapped the serialization of Oliver Twist, and the editing of Memoirs of Grimaldi. Nicholas Nickleby, this ‘hero as a young man’ novel, was also serialized, starting in April 1838 and ending October 1839. Again some real-life people became part of the novel’s theatrics: Squeers, based on William Shaw, a bung-eyed school proprietor who had been sued in court for mistreating his charges; and garrulous Mrs Nickleby, based on Dickens’s own mother. Dickens must have been pleased with sales; the first number sold 48,000. This Dickens-like Nickleby (beside Miss Squeers) was executed by illustrator Frederick Barnard for the ‘Household Edition’, the first edition to be published after Dickens’s death in 1870.
[Oh! As soft as possible, if you please. Illustration by Frederick Barnard from page 53 of Charles Dickens's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Household Edition.]
Even before finishing Pickwick Papers, Dickens had contracted himself to edit Bentley’s Miscellany and provide a serial story – all for the sum of £20 a month. In the second number began Oliver Twist, Dickens’s second novel. It was serialized in 24 monthly instalments between February 1837 and April 1839, with production faulting for a month due to the death of Mary Hogarth. In the Miscellany (as displayed), the story was set in ‘Mudfog’, later altered to ‘a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning.’ George Cruikshank provided the illustrations, including this memorable one of Oliver asking for more gruel.
[Oliver asking for more. Illustration by George Cruikshank, opposite page 105 in Charles Dickens's ‘Oliver Twist’, in Bentley’s Miscellany. Vol. I.]
Even before finishing Pickwick Papers, Dickens had contracted himself to edit Bentley’s Miscellany and provide a serial story – all for the sum of £20 a month. In the second number began Oliver Twist, Dickens’s second novel. It was serialized in 24 monthly instalments between February 1837 and April 1839, with production faulting for a month due to the death of Mary Hogarth. In the Miscellany (as displayed), the story was set in ‘Mudfog’, later altered to ‘a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning.’ George Cruikshank provided the illustrations, including this memorable one of Oliver asking for more gruel.
[Page 105 from Charles Dickens's 'Oliver Twist’ Chapter 1 in Bentley’s Miscellany. Vol. I.]
‘Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell’ dies in Dickens’s tale The Old Curiosity Shop, which caused much consternation and many tears to be shed by readers. This plate was executed by George Cattermole (1800-1868).
[At Rest (The Death of Little Nell). Illustration by George Cattermole from Charles Dickens's Master Humphrey’s Clock. Volume II.]
‘Night is generally my time for walking.’ So begins Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, which features innocent Nell Trent pitted against the corrupt Quilp. Written to revive flagging sales of his own weekly serial Master Humphrey’s Clock, The Old Curiosity Shop began in the fourth number (25 April 1840). This overly sentimental novel has always provoked reaction. Irish politician Daniel O’Connell threw the book out of the train when he realized that Nell was going to die. Illustrators ‘Phiz’, George Cattermole, Maclise, and Samuel Williams were engaged to enhance the text.
[Page 109 from Charles Dickens's ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, in Master Humphrey’s Clock. 1st edition, Vol. I. Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz).]
Did Dickens invent Christmas? No, but he certainly deserves credit for rejuvenating celebrations surrounding the day. Indeed, he is the one writer strongly identified with Christmas – and its spirit. Within a six year period he wrote five Christmas books: A Christmas Carol (1843); The Chimes (1844); The Cricket on the Hearth (1845); The Battle of Life (1846); and The Haunted Man (1848). Issued ten days before Christmas 1843, A Christmas Carol sold 6000 copies in one day. Nevertheless, and at least initially, it was a commercial failure. It was also the first and last time that Dickens used a colour title-page. The story of selfishness and transformation has become a modern classic of Christmas literature, and is quintessentially Victorian Dickens.
[Title page and frontispiece, illustrations by John Leech, from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.]
While the change of heart is present in The Battle of Life, there are no ghosts. Dickens wanted to make this anticipated money-spinner ‘a simple domestic tale’. With a mix of the historical – featuring a battle-field scene harking back to his visit to Waterloo – and the personal moral and emotional skirmishes surrounding sisters Marion and Grace, the book became a tough write, indeed ‘desperate work’. At the time, he was also writing Dombey and Son, and travelling back and forth between Lausanne, Paris, and London. Publishers Bradbury and Evans employed Leech, Maclise, and Richard Doyle, uncle to Arthur Conan Doyle, to illustrate this fourth Christmas book.
[Title page and frontispiece, illustrations by Daniel Maclise, from Charles Dickens's The Battle of Life: A Love Story.]
By his eighth novel, David Copperfield, Dickens was ready for a little more self-revelation, albeit with some difficulty in ‘dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world.’ David Copperfield (1850), his so-called ‘favourite child’, is the most autobiographical of his works, and is considered by scholars to be the dividing line between his early and later novels. Mirrored in the book are his Blacking Factory experiences; his early love interest with Maria Beadnell; and his early writing career. And of course there are the characters: Heep, Steerforth, Betsy Trotwood, Mr Dick, and Micawber, who is despatched to Australia. Two of Dickens’s sons lived in Australia and he contemplated a reading tour ‘down-under’. Unfortunately, this did not happen.
[I fall into captivity. Illustration by Phiz opposite page 274 in Charles Dickens's The Personal History of David Copperfield, 1st book edition, 1st issue.]
In the preface to the Cheap Edition of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens wrote: ‘My main object in the story was, to exhibit in a variety of aspects the commonest of all vices; to show how Selfishness propagates itself.’ In fact, unlike his approach to his previous works, Dickens had an overall design and unifying theme for Martin Chuzzlewit. Published in monthly parts between January 1843 and July 1844, and edited by ‘Boz’ (used for the last time), the work was then produced in book form (as displayed). The character of Pecksniff, that epitome of hypocrisy, is delineated here by ‘Phiz’.
[Mr Pecksniff on his Mission. Illustration by Phiz facing page 235 in Charles Dickens's The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, 1st book edition.]
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.]
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]
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.]
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. ]
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. ]
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. ]
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).]
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.]
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.]
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.]