DICKENS AS A LITIGANT.*
IN this modest little volume Mr. Jaques makes a real addition to Dickens literature. He has had the curiosity to search out the records of the proceedings which, as is well known from a brief reference in Forster, Dickens instituted against persons who had pirated the Christmas Carol in 1843 and 1844. Five suits were instituted by the novelist, but only one was con- tested, the defendants in this case being Messrs. Lee and Haddock, booksellers and publishers, of Craven Yard, Drury Lane. These gentlemen conducted a periodical entitled Parley's Library, or Treasury of Knowledge, Entertainment, and Delight, the object of which was (in the exquisite phrase of one of the affidavits of the defence) to "analytically reoriginate " the works of famous authors. The thing was of course, a barefaced plagiarism, with two or three new illustrations, a few alight changes of language of a merely colourable nature, and the substitution of a new title, The Christmas Ghost Story. The pirates had already " reoriginated " The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Budge, and they asserted (no doubt with truth, since the price of each number was apparently only one penny) that as many as seventy thousand copies of some issues had been sold. The defence raised was of an almost incredible impudence. Lee, one of the firm ; Hewitt, the hack who produced the "analytical reorigination " ; Stiff, the illustrator; and two literary experts (one of them E. L. Blanchard, afterwards well known us a writer of pantomimes and dramatic criticism) gave evidence. In their description Parley's Library figures as a positively philanthropic enterprise designed to "afford to the youth of both sexes such an introduction to illustrious writers as will engender fierce and irresistible desire to become more intimately acquainted with the productions of these • Charles Dickens in Chat:eery. By E. T. Jaques. London Longman and Co. Lis. net.1
master spirits." The " reoriginations " are represented as only possible with great expenditure of intellectual toil and money. The illustrator receives " considerable sums " for his work, while the hack himself claims to be retained at a high salary. It is even asserted that the " reoriginations " are improvements on the works of Mr. Dickens, and (a still bolder flight) that Mr. Dickens has himself been indebted to Parley's for valuable hints in the compilation of his novels. As for the literary experts, they said just what one would have expected of them. But even their pontifical utterances could not save the defence, and the Vice-Chancellor granted an injunction without even calling on Talfourd, who had advised the proceedings, and, of course, appeared for his friend.
According to the procedure of those times, Dickens had to undertake to bring a common law action against the pirates within ten days, but this action, it need hardly be said, never came to trial. We know from Forster that the defendants subsequently agreed to pay costs and apologize, but the unfortunate author got nothing out of the agreement, and it is not surprising that the memory of the time and money wasted in the proceedings, which must, at the monstrous rates then current, have cost him some hun- dreds of pounds, long rankled in Dickens's mind. Indeed, his brief personal experience probably (as Mr. Jaques points out) bad a good deal to do with the famous crusade of Bleak House. Mr. Jaques's researches have therefore a genuine historical value, and they throw an interesting sidelight on the Grub Street of the day. It is possible, through the quotations from Blanchard's reminiscences which Mr. Jaques gives, to see something of the real working of the Lee and Haddock establishment. Poor Blanchard himself was glad at this time to " pot down" three-volume novels for Parley's, receiving, we are told, about ten shillings for each work ; and one may be sure that the "considerable salary " of Hewitt, the actual " potter " of the Carol, was on no more generous scale. Mr. Jaques pursues these and other alluring byways of investigation with an agreeable discursiveness, and one leaves his pamphlet with the feeling that he has done exceedingly pleasantly something that was well worth doing.
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