Dickens and the Codebreakers: The Annotated Set of All the Year Round

On 7 May 2015 a “secret” meeting took place in Senate House, University of London, between two Dickens scholars, a Wilkie Collins specialist, and an English antiquarian book dealer (see Dugan). The purpose of the gathering was to authenticate a series of carefully inscribed annotations in a handsomely bound set of All the Year Round, the journal which Dickens edited from 1859 until his death in 1870 (see Drew, Dickens the Journalist 137–57). The bookseller, Jeremy Parrott, had purchased the twenty volumes unseen, from an online dealer in Wrexham, north Wales, in September 2014. The three specialists who met Parrott (Michael Slater, John Drew, and Paul Lewis), and had a brief opportunity to examine a number of sample volumes, came away convinced that the marginalia, which identified by name the authors of each of the individual pieces, were genuine. Later that month Michael Slater contacted me, and shared a number of digital photographs (reproduced here) of the annotations; he asked me, in my role as the Principal Editor of Dickens’s Letters, if I thought the entries were genuine, and whether or not I could confirm that the handwriting was Dickens’s own.

The implications of this discovery are huge for Dickens scholars, as well as for those who study the host of authors – numbering between three and four hundred – who wrote for this journal. The names of some contributors have long been known; they include Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins and his brother Charles, Percy Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Gaskell, Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Lever, Eliza Lynn Linton, Henry Morley, Adelaide Procter, Charles Reade, George Augustus Sala, Walter Thornbury, Frances Trollope and Edmund Yates (see Oppenlander 250–99 and Dickens Journals Online). Some, like Wilkie Collins, were easily identified by contemporaries, because their installments of serial fiction carried such unencrypted titles as “NO NAME. BY THE AUTHOR OF ‘THE WOMAN IN WHITE,’ &c.” In other cases, though, no record of authorship has survived; this newly discovered annotated set of the First Series of All the Year Round has introduced into the circle of contributors such well known figures as Lewis Carroll, and has also expanded the range of pieces penned by Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and Dickens himself (see Dugan and Milmo, “Charles Dickens revealed”).

Up until now, in the case of All the Year Round, a great deal of detective work has been employed to establish authorship of many of the individual pieces. The reason for this situation is that we do not possess a resource like the “Office Book” for Household Words. That indispensable volume, meticulously compiled by Dickens’s sub-editor, W. H. Wills, surfaced in 1903, and now resides in the Morris L. Parrish Collection at Princeton University. It identifies the author(s) of each article published during the nine-year run of the journal, and provides details of the date of payment, amount paid, and other relevant data. The Office Book is rightly judged by Anne Lohrli to be “the only trustworthy record of Household Words contributors” (Lohrli 43); it formed the basis of her authoritative reference work, which has proved of inestimable value to researchers of Victorian periodicals (see Drew and Craig 267–8). It may be safe to assume that Wills, who managed “all aspects of the Commercial Department and much of the Literary work” for All the Year Round (Drew, Dickens the Journalist 137) also kept an Office Book for the later journal; if it still exists, its whereabouts are unknown.

There is, however, a record of another source: a so-called “‘office’ set.” One of the founders of the Dickens Fellowship, Frederic George Kitton (author of such indispensable early works as Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil) compiled a discursive bibliographic history entitled The Minor Writings of Charles Dickens (1900). In his preface he stated that his work represented “the compilation of a complete list of Dickens’s ephemeral contributions to periodical literature, notably to those journals of which he himself was editor”; he added that

With respect to All the Year Round my task was simplified owing to the fact that, by great...