From the Editor

The articles appearing in this Special Issue represent responses to a call for papers on wills and other topics made in March 2016. The first essay, "Dickens and Wills: Voices from the Past," considers the historical context in which Dickens's awareness of wills developed during a period of reform. Between 1833 and 1837 the business of will making came under close parliamentary scrutiny, resulting eventually in the repeal of decades of testamentary law. Listed in the Statute Books of the United Kingdom as 7 Will. 4 & 1 Vic. c. 26, the 1837 Wills Act created a new and accessible mechanism for expressing an urge inflected with centuries of theological and legal advice to assert agency in the final act of life. One's Last Will and Testament, in the formal language of the law, is "The writing by which a person nominates an executor to administer his personal or movable estate after his death."

Expressed in those terms, documents drafted by legal professionals might seem devoid of interest. Such a conclusion could not be further from the truth. Wills, as Dickens discovered, yielded many secrets, miniature portraits of a testator's character, of figures whose "animosity and bitterness" shed a kaleidoscopic light on the recesses of human nature ("Doctors' Commons," 1836). A generation earlier, covering identical ground, William Hazlitt had drawn a similar conclusion, observing that, if anything, "the approach and contemplation of death" would surely "bring men to a sense of reason and self-knowledge." To the contrary, he reflected in "On Will-Making," setting down one's intentions in their final form seemed only to deprive testators "of the little wit they had, and to make them even more the sport of their willfulness and short-sightedness." Whatever art belonged to will making, Hazlitt noted, "chiefly consists in baffling the importunity of expectation."¹

Comments by Dickens follow suit, although as this collection makes clear, what he had to say about the behavior of testators, real or fictional, remains personal and idiosyncratic. As Michael Allen suggests, the matter of wills rose to the forefront of the family's attention in 1822 when John Dickens left the Navy Pay Office in Chatham to join the "Branch for Inspecting Seamen's Wills" in Somerset House, London. Although much office work remained dull and routine, John Dickens's service evidently had an impact on domestic life. It also introduced Charles to an intense and often impassioned world he would later observe for himself. Wills, as Michael Allen notes, "raised emotions and had the potential to transform the lives of ordinary people," a lesson reinforced when work as a shorthand reporter in the Probate Office of Doctors' Commons brought Dickens face to face with the wills of eccentric, troubled and vindictive testators.

Robert Tracy's "Heir Conditioning: Dickens Planning Ahead" traces the evolution of Dickens's interest in testamentary documents to its next stage: a realization that wills were as useful to novelists as they were to real people. Most particularly, Tracy argues, Dickens seized on wills as a way to shape events and explain implausible mysteries that had kept serial readers in suspense over a prolonged engagement. Wills and inheritance assumed a key role in Dickens's fiction, persisting even after he took to drafting monthly numbers plans, a device that served him from Dombey and Son onwards for the rest of his career. "Dickens's imagined testators think like novelists," Tracy argues. "They write wills that control heirs as novelists control fictional characters."

The next group of essays directs attention to the author's own final testamentary decisions. "Read the will! Read the will!" shout the fickle plebeians surrounding Mark Antony in Julius Caesar (III, ii), as Antony, deftly and slyly, playing to their emotions, advances his own subversive agenda. Robert L. Patten, by contrast, brings insight and patience born of a vocation dedicated to the study of Dickens. In a rational and sustained scrutiny of the document itself, "Dickens Wills" constructs the stages of Dickens's thinking, the evolution of his priorities and ultimate wish, at the close of a career defined by many identities, to meet household, familial, private and professional...