The Long and Short of Charles Dickens

The 2012 bicentennial of Charles Dickens's birth has predictably seen an increase in Dickens-related publications, some of which were released in 2011. These include two fine new biographical treatments, the reissue of the oldest Dickens biography, some Dickens fiction and correspondence, and at least one moderately interesting oddity.

Dickens is a national treasure, and the Oxford University Press has long been invested in his work; they are responsible for the Oxford Illustrated Dickens, published in twenty-one volumes in the 1940s and 50s and reprinted in 1987, the Pilgrim edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, The Speeches of Charles Dickens, and much more. It stands to reason, then, that The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley and drawn from the Pilgrim Edition, which itself took thirty-seven years to appear, is an oup product. This is useful to have, not only because so many of the letters are interesting—Dickens could be a wonderful correspondent, and his letters help us to realize how much of his life was dedicated to the maintenance of his friendships—but also because of Hartley's informative introduction. Dickens wrote enormous numbers of letters, spending a good part of every day on them. The Pilgrim edition runs to twelve volumes.

For one early collection, assembled by Dickens's daughter Mamie and his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, the two editors cut some letters, altered others, and discarded yet more. Worse was the practice of John Forster, Dickens's close friend and first biographer. He quoted from nearly a thousand letters from his friend, and said that another thousand had to be "set aside," but now fewer than 200 of them survive. With the letters he did use, he cut bits and discarded what he did not use and, as Hartley quotes the Pilgrim editors, "Wherever he could improve on his originals Forster apparently thought he had a right to do so." Dickens had often invited Forster's editorial attentions while alive, for instance sending him part of a novel in manuscript from France and asking Forster to rewrite any sentences that had fallen too insistently into blank verse. Forster loyally withheld the facts of Dickens's relationship with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, from readers of the biography, and he put the best possible interpretation on awkward facts; so amending and suppressing may have seemed part of his job.

Among the letters is plenty of evidence of Dickens's energy, his passion, his genuine compassion for the downtrodden, and what must be called his genius. I confess I was equally drawn to the glimpses of the less than Inimitable. To Frederick Evans, his longtime friend and publisher and the future father-in-law of his own daughter, he writes majestically, in 1858, declaring: "I have had stern occasion to impress upon my children that their father's name is their best possession and that it would indeed be trifled with and wasted by him, if, either through himself or through them, he held any terms with those who have been false to it. . . . I have been forced to include you in this class. I have no more to say."

They never met again. What was Evans's falseness? He had declined, as publisher of Punch (a comic magazine, after all), to run in its pages Dickens's...