The Letters of Charles Dickens: The Pilgrim Edition Volume 9: 1859-1861

This ninth volume presents about 1,100 letters, many unpublished, from the years 1859 to 1861. It records Dickens's writing of two major novels, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, both published weekly in All the Year Round: the letters give an unusual insight into the inspiration for both. It also shows him planning planning and writing a substantial amount of the three Christmas numbers of this period, 'A Haunted House', 'A Message from the Sea', and 'Tom Tiddler's Ground'. He expends great energy in establishing All the Year Round, to succeed Household Words, and during 1860 writes the first fourteen of his Uncommercial Traveller series. During these three years he gives two provincial tours of readings, in addition to readings in London. He spends a considerable part of his time at Gad's Hill, relying on his daughter Mamie and sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth to act as hostesses; the All the Year Round office becomes his London base. Ellen Ternan continues to act, though with diminishing success; in January 1859 Dickens almost certainly buys a long lease of 2 Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, for the Ternan family.

Review:

We get a lively sense of the hardworking novelist's distractions. * Alexander Welsh, Victorian Studies * if there are few or even no surprises among the total of 1013 documents, some 676 of which are new, readers will find letters that command attention, many written with the animation and inventive flair we associate with his fiction. * Dickens Quarterly, vol, XVII, no.1 * Meticulous documentation, the factual annotation and verification of persons, places and things, together with a superbly detailed index, set an editorial standard that make the Pilgrim Letters an outstanding example of a collective scholarly enterprise. A writer of Dickens's stature deserves nothing less. Happily in the case of the Pilgrim volumes the project and the subject enhance each other's glory. * Dickens Quarterly, vol.XVII, no.1 *