The Charles Dickens Letters Project ed. by Leon Litvack and Emily Bell (review)

Charles Dickens destroyed the bulk of his letters in one tragic September 1860 event, known as the Bonfire at Gad's Hill Place. Aided by his reluctant children, Dickens burned baskets of private papers spanning a twenty-year period, perhaps exercising editorial control over his life through this drastic measure, which was repeated in another conflagration a few years later. Most of these were likely authored not by Dickens himself, but by family members, literary writers, public figures, fans, and perhaps even his secret mistress. His recipients, however, retained, preserved, and treasured Dickens's communications, many of which came to light after his death in 1870. To the delight of Victorians mourning their celebrated author, between 1880–93, Dickens's sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth and eldest daughter Mamie published three editions of his surviving correspondence, The Letters of Charles Dickens from 1833 to 1870. Over the decades, several collections of Dickens's letters have followed, adding to knowledge of Dickens's various public and personal activities. For Dickens scholars, the definitive edition of his correspondence is The Letters of Charles Dickens (1965–2002), edited by Madeline House, Graham Storey, et. al., the "Pilgrim Edition." Reviewers deemed the twelve volumes published by the Clarendon Press "scrupulous and informative" (Sunday Telegraph), "meticulously researched" (Sunday Times), "a superlative work on a grand scale" (Yearbook of English Studies) and "accurately edited, annotated to the full" (Times Literary Supplement).

Since publication of the last of these volumes in 2002, previously undocumented letters by Dickens have appeared with steady regularity, on average between thirty to forty per annum. Initially, The Dickensian, journal of the Dickens Fellowship, published the majority of these new letters between 2002–13 in nineteen printed supplements to the Pilgrim Edition. Editors were Angus Easson, Margaret Brown, Joan Dicks, Paul Schlicke, Ben Winyard, and Leon Litvack. Since 2013, Litvack continues to publish these letters through the journal, while also categorizing and uploading Dickens's new letters in his capacity as current principal editor of The Charles Dickens Letters Project, a site sponsored by the Dickens Fellowship. Joining him in his endeavor are editor Emily Bell and consultant editor Michael Slater. As of April 2020, there are approximately 450 letters on the site, with another 150 in the process of being edited for upload. An recent addition is twenty-four edited letters addressed to Christian Bernhard Tauchnitz, the official German publisher of Charles Dickens's works and the Tauchnitz Collection of British and American Authors, a series begun in 1842 which released new titles for over one hundred years. Eventually, having achieved the milestone of 1,000 or so discovered letters, this online collection will form the thirteenth printed volume of the Pilgrim Edition.

Inclusion of a Dickens timeline and a biographical sketch of Dickens by Michael Slater on the Charles Dickens Letters Project website ensures that those unfamiliar with major events in the author's life and his publications can acquire a swift but solid grounding. At the bottom of the home screen, users can view a list of the twenty most recently uploaded letters. Conveniently located on the left of the home page is the advanced search feature, which allows for text searching (word or phrase) across the collection. Letters are grouped by nearly one hundred themes, mostly specific titles of works and names of topics discussed (e.g. Bleak House, charity, Germany). Scholars of A Christmas Carol (1843) can simply select that theme to instantly access letters mentioning it by phrase or subject even if no text is entered into the search box. Four demarcated periods are available for searching: 1837–1840, 1841–1850, 1851–1860 and 1861–1870. Selecting any one of these options yields a list of all letters available within this period, though these are not listed chronologically in relation to each other; if written to the same recipient, multiple letters are listed adjacently, but in no particular order. This is perhaps a feature to consider...