The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume 12: 1868-1870, and: The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens (review)

On the triumphant occasion of the completion of the British Academy-Pilgrim edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens (the first volume appeared in 1965), it is alarming to read in the first chapter of the latest CambridgeCompanion that, while the letters may be "vivid and amusing," they are nonetheless "partial and to some extent self-regarding," like any bits of autobiography. Yet "countless critics, scholars, and biographers," we are told—the present reviewer cringes here, but is thankful for the company—"rely on these letters as evidence of Dickens's life with little acknowledgement of this partiality and bias" (2).

One would have thought that the whole point of collecting, authenticating, transcribing, editing, and annotating an author's letters was, precisely, to render accessible the words, both self- and other-regarding, as they flowed from his or her pen at discrete intervals over a lifetime. Bias, it goes without saying, inheres in the very slant of the handwriting on the page, and the only better way of observing it would be to follow in the path of Graham Storey, his helpers, and associates around the world and ask to see the holographs—having first acquired the comparable knowledge and skills to read them. To be sure, letters do not always dependably represent feelings or even appearances. A series of snapshots would provide a better record of the latter, but scarcely the former. An audio or audiovisual record will come to have different but parallel limitations. What published letters purport to be is what they once were: written communications between one person (one hand, at least) and one or more readers. It is clearly possible for the present-day readers of The Letters of Charles Dickens to imagine themselves in the place of the original recipients, and Storey and company have done a marvelous job of informing us, by means of their footnotes, of who even the least of these recipients were.

Some recipients in this final volume, from the writer's last years, need no footnoting. Dickens has to break a lunch date with William Ewart Gladstone, for example. Should Dickens have denied himself this opportunity to talk with the prime minister merely because his thumb was bandaged and in pain, and with only five months left to lunch with anyone, period? We know that Dickens died 9 June 1870—that on 8 June, indeed, he wrote at least four letters before suffering a stroke and losing consciousness forever—but Dickens did not know what we know, and the resulting dramatic irony colors our understanding of events. We are likely to be more uneasy than the great man himself as each possible symptom reveals itself in the months previous. So there is another sort of bias, shared by critics, scholars, and biographers alike—the bias of hindsight—and a corresponding truthfulness in the kind of biography this is, all twelve volumes of it. The writer and his correspondents live from day to day. The future, the course of history after the letter is posted, is nowhere as intelligible as the past.

More troubling than the personal bias of a life in letters may be the violation, through preservation and publication, of the private correspondence that the letters once served. This exposure is a different aspect of the same dramatic irony, if you will, but something that Dickens would rather have done without. We know that in 1860, in the course of moving his principal residence from Tavistock House in London to Gad's Hill in Kent, he burned basketfuls of letters from others dating back twenty years, and that...