Knowing Dickens

Acknowledgments

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Acknowledgments My first tribute belongs to all the scholars and editors who made the Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, published by Clarendon Press under the general direction of Madeline House, Graham Storey,and Kathleen Tillotson. The twelfth and final volume of this magnificent edition came out in 2002, helping me to complete the groundwork for this study of Dickens’s letters and fictions. I am similarly indebted to The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, edited by Michael Slater; both editions are rich with annotations and connections that were invaluable to me. Janice Carlisle and Andrew Von Hendy,the first readers of these chapters, helped me enormously with editorial suggestions laced with affectionate enthusiasm for the project. Peter J. Potter of Cornell University Press has been a welcoming and efficient editor. My anonymous press reviewers served as excellent guides for the final stages of revision. I wish there were an adequate way to thank all those friends, students, teachers, and critics, known to me in person or in print, who have helped to shape my thoughts in ways I can no longer retrieve, over the several decades of my fascination with Dickens’s work. In recent years, friends and colleagues have directly helped to stimulate parts of this book by offering me opportunities to present or publish my ideas as they were developing; for this I warmly thank Suzy Anger, John Bowen, James Buzard, Janice Carlisle, Margaret Harris,Gerhard Joseph,Richard Kaye, Joss Marsh,Bob Patten,Leah Price, Hilary Schor, and Carolyn Williams. The Dickens Universe, sponsored each summer by the Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz,played a crucial role by giving me the heart to think of my early biographical-critical forays as the beginnings of a book. I am grateful to all the friends I met or made there for their generous collegiality, with special appreciation for Dickens Project Director John Jordan. Back at home in the Boston College English department, Judith Wilt shared with me her always inventive Dickens mind, Kevin Ohi inspired me with his uncannily knowing sense of David Copperfield,and Mary Crane kept me amused through the toils of chapter-drafting with her interest in what was brewing in the Dickens vat. My brothers Peter and Tom Bodenheimer, unstoppable walkers and writers in their different fields, were often in my mind as I wrote the last chapter. What my husband and colleague Andrew Von Hendy gave to me during the whole process can hardly be measured in words. Brief sections of chapters 2, 3, and 4 appeared in earlier forms in Dickens Studies Annual 30 (2002): 159–74, Victorian Studies 48.2 (2006): 268–76, and Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies (2006), ed. John Bowen and Robert L. Patten, 48–68. I thank AMS Press, Indiana University Press, and Palgrave Macmillan for permission to use this material. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...