Charles Dickens’s letters provide vivid close-up snapshots of a life lived at maximum intensity. This volume offers the first selection to be made from the magisterial twelve-volume British Academy Pilgrim Edition of his letters. From over fourteen thousand, editor Jenny Hartley has cherrypicked four hundred and fifty to give readers the essence of “the Sparkler of Albion.”
This eagerly awaited selection takes us straight to the heart of his life, to show us Dickens at first hand. Here he is writing out of the heat of the moment: as a novelist, journalist, and magazine editor; as a social campaigner and traveler in Europe and America; and as friend, lover, husband, and father. These letters were an outlet for his high spirits, sparkling wit, and caustic commentary–striking glimpses of the world around him, as seen through his highly individual and acutely observing eye. Whether you dip in or read straight through, this selection of his letters captures anew the brilliance of Dickens and the sheer pleasure of being in his company.
About Jenny Hartley
Jenny Hartley is Professor of English Literature at Roehampton University. Her recent Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women was a Guardian Book of the Week and hailed as “brilliant” by Claire Tomalin.
Editorial Review
No one will ever write like this again, not in this brave new world of e-mail, emoticons and textual truncation. Dickens was an epistolary phenomenon. He wrote often (thousands of letters), with great fluidity and wit and at great length. In an early, heartbroken letter to a young woman who had dismissed him, he reeled off a 141-word sentence that basically said, “I am returning some things you gave me.” He wrote to the high and the low, to geniuses and wannabes and fans and fools alike. Hartley includes samples of letters to Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, William Makepeace Thackeray and Michael Faraday. In an 1862 letter to Wilkie Collins about Collins’ novel-in-progress No Name, Dickens interrupts his praise to teach his friend the difference between “lie” and “lay.” Among responses to pious people wondering why Dickens’ stories weren’t more patently Christian are work-a-day samples of Dickens in his roles as husband, father, writer, editor, friend and colleague. Dickens also wrote to friends about his travels to the United States. During his first visit to our shores in 1842, he was a bit more caustic about us than he was in 1867. Of great interest are his letters about his works-in-progress and his furtive affair with actress Ellen Ternan. Hartley, who reproduces the annotations from the complete edition, wisely stays out of the way and lets her gifted principal command the stage. – Kirkus Reviews
Book review: ‘The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens’
The Los Angeles Times Book Review – April 8, 2012 (Excerpt)
This is the bicentennial year of Charles Dickens’ birth. We need no reminder of his eminence as novelist, but there are celebrations of his other attainments as well. “The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens” is part of that. As its editor observes, a 12-volume edition of letters already exists; it took from 1965 to 2002 to compile the British Academy Pilgrim Edition “The Letters of Charles Dickens.” Although in September 1860 the writer made a bonfire of personal papers in a field at his house, Gad’s Hill, some 14,000 missives survived. The Pilgrim Edition contains them all (newly discovered letters have been published as supplements in the journal the Dickensian); this new edition of selections amounts to a “mere” 450 examples of the master’s epistolary prose. None but the librarian or obsessive devotee of Dickens’ work need thumb through all 12 volumes, but many will want this smaller edition to own. Its annotations are useful; its print is — for these eyes, at least — too small; it offers the author writ large.
Jenny Hartley describes her process admirably, and it’s worth quoting here:
“In reducing twelve volumes to one, and the 14,000 to 450, the main criterion is to show Dickens’ range as a letter writer. Readers who enjoy his fiction, his journalism, and his travel writing will appreciate his gifts in this fourth genre. On display here, notably in this condensed version, is the epistolary as the genre of exuberance. We see at first hand his indefatigable labors as a magazine editor, his exasperation with business arrangements (not always to his credit), his close involvement with philanthropic projects, his responses to issues of the day such as public hangings, and his alertness as a traveler. We can feel the warmth of his friendships, the richness of his social life, and, throughout, his pleasure in writing.” [Read the full article...]
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