BOOKS The Great Correspondent

By GRAHAM HOUGH

THE sheer quantity of work accomplished by the great Victorians is a standing cause of wonderment. Lionel Trilling once suggested that time must have been a different dimension in those days. Besides his novels, stories, speeches, his editorship of two magazines, his readings from his own works and his innumerable miscel- laneous activities, Dickens found time to write letters that in the new Pilgrim edition will run to twelve volumes. And these are only a part of what are known to have survived at one time.

Forster's biography was largely illustrated. by letters, but they were nearly all to Forster. Georgina Hogarth, Dickens's sister-in-law, and Mamie Dickens, his daughter, produced an edition of his letters not long after his death. They published about 1,000 letters to 200 corre- spondents. A number of special collections appeared at intervals between 1890 and the early Thirties. In 1938, as part of a limited edition of Dickens's works, the Nonesuch Press published three volumes of letters, edited by Walter Dexter. This included 5,811 letters to nearly 1,000 corre- spondents. It gathered up most of the published material and added a good deal more from manuscript sources. This has remained the stan- dard collection till now. We now have the first volume of the Pilgrim edition,* edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey, which will ultimately include about 12,000 letters to 1,800 correspondents.

This can be said with some confidence to be the final edition. The job will not have to be done again. No doubt odd fragments will trickle in after its completion, for such is the way of things; but with trivial exceptions the Pilgrim edition will contain all the letters of Dickens known to survive. Dickensiana have always been prized objects to collectors, and the present edi- tors tell us that letters have turned up from every continent except Antarctica.

For eminent persons it must add a new terror to death to know that their unconsidered vestiges will be brought together from all corners of the globe with such relentless care. In Dickens's case, it is known that much has not survived. The nine- teenth century was the age of voluminous per- sonal correspondence; but it was also the age of slapdash editing and meticulous family reti- cence. Forster used nearly 1,000 letters for his Life, but he apparently took many liberties with them—misdating. emending, and sometimes ac- tually rewriting.

The extent of his manipulation can never be known, for the originals of most of these letters have disappeared. Georgina and Mamie, as they said themselves, 'cut and condensed remorse- lessly,' and they regarded it as part of their duty to see that nothing personal should ever get into print. An enormous number of letters Was destroyed by Forster, whose principle was to liquidate all merely private correspondence. This means that nearly all the family letters, in- cluding those to Dickens's sons and daughters, have gone. Georgina Hogarth destroyed a large *TuE LETTERS OF CHARLES Dicimivs. The Pilgrim Edition. Volume I. 1820-1839. Edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey. (O.U.P., six guineas.) batch, mostly relating to money matters and the debts of Dickens pere. Other correspondents did likewise, including Sydney. Smith and Hablot Knight Brown. And many letters concerning Ellen Ternan, Dickens's mistress, are known to have been destroyed. The general purpose, con- scious or unconscious, that directed these oblitera- tions seems to have been to adapt the surviv- ing records to an idealised biography.

The new edition is a splendid editorial enter- prise. Its planning was entirely the work of Humphry House, who set and intended to set the highest of standards. He had an encyclo- pedic knowledge of the Victorian age, he was the most exacting of scholars, and perhaps the only one to think or applying to nineteenth-cen- tury material the copious and rigorous methods that have so far seemed appropriate only to classical or Shakespearian editing. After his death in 1955, the work was taken on by Mrs. House and Graham Storey, with the addition as time went by of a considerable corps of helpers, in- cluding W. J. Carlton, Philip Collins, K. J. Fielding and Kathleen Tillotson. Humphry House's original plan has been fulfilled with scrupulous care; and the only thing to say about the editorial work is quite simply that it could not be improved.

Headnotes give dates, provenance and authority for the text, footnotes give biographical material on the correspondents, explain everything that needs explaining, or make an honest confession of nescience on the rare occasion when infor- mation has not been forthcoming. The reader of many collections of letters is familiar with the experience of being offered officious en- lightenment on matters which he knows very well and of being faced with discreet silence on anything that is really difficult to find out. House expressed the hope at the beginning of this work that it would be a contribution to the biography of the period; and so indeed it is. It is a compendium of information about literary characters and those on the fringe of literature in the mid-nineteenth century.

A great problem in this early volume has been the dating of undated letters. Of the 1,059 letters included, 722 arc without dates or post- marks. Some could be dated by references to outside events; and on the basis of these a remarkable series of changes in Dickens's hand-

writing and signature was discovered. Dickens was evidently experimenting with his signature during the whole of the period covered by this volume (1820-39), and some small whim or variation would be followed with great con- sistency for a few months, then to be replaced by another set of tricks.

By observing these changes with extraordin- ary assiduity, the editors have been able to give pretty firm dates to almost all th.e letters, so that what might have been a misleading jumble becomes a lucid and intelligible series. It is just one example of the extreme care and great labour that have gone to the making of this edition.

The demon doubt that must obtrude itself is --has it been worth the trouble? Dickens's letters

have no intellectual or speculative interest. They are not thoughtful or reflective. They tell us very little of his inner history. Even the letters to his future wife consist mostly of excuses for not being able to get round to see her. He does not discuss his works, except in terms of stints to be accomplished or illustrations to be arranged. There are very many mere notes—invita- tions, arrangements to meet that would now be done on the telephone. And the letters of sub- stance are mostly matters of business, often intricate and sometimes acrimonious.

One's first thought is that something less than exhaustive would have done just as well. Yet whenever the book is picked up and wherever it is opened, it is extremely hard to put down. I think there are two reasons for this. One is the continual ebullient energy that seems to survive in every line, however trivial the occasion. The other is that because Dickens wrote so many letters we have the sensation of following his life almost from day to day. Almost any life inspected as closely as this would become fascinating; and in Dickens's case there is the additional puzzle of fitting this multifarious, cantankerous, egotistical extrovert to the quite unrevealed and still mysterious writer of the novels.

The student of manners will find much rich pasture. The ceremonious jocularities of one young clerk to another, the tone in which it is proper to address a young woman who you think has treated you badly, the alternate asser- tions of one's homely naturalness and of one's irrefragable gentility-- all these form a wonderful exhibition of early Victorian bourgeois comport- ment. Dickens's early social and domestic life is very like the sort of thing he caricatures in Boz, and we realise how little in the way of verbal heightening he had to do to produce some of his bizarre effects.

Many a fevered head and palsied hand will gather new vigour in the hour of sickness and distress from 'your excellent exertions; many a widowed mother and orphan child, who would otherwise reap nothing from the fame of de- parted genius but its too frequent legacy of poverty and suffering, will bear. in their altered condition, higher testimony to the value of your labours than the most lavish encomiums from lip or pen could afford.

This does not come from the pen of Micawber, Chadband or Sapsea, but from that of Dickens in his own person, writing to T. N. Talfourd about his Copyright Bill. We don't get much deeper into the mind of the creator of the novels through these letters; but we get the most copious and vivid presentation of his world.

An elaborate row with Bentley, Dickens's early publisher, occupies the centre of this corre- spondence. It shows a side of Dickens that has often been remarked on, but never perhaps so fully illustrated before—the constant concern with money, the extreme business sharpness, the touchy sense of his own deserts, and the readiness to be appeased when the quarrel is over. The words 'candid' and 'gentlemanly' do a great deal of duty in these disputes.

Dickens wants his money and he wants his rights; but he can't help putting even a wrangle about a contract on a human, man-to-man basis; and the whole thing is as likely as not to end with a dinner. The Dickens revealed here is different from Foster's ideal portrait; but we also find him at great trouble, at a time when he is desperately overworked, to get up a sub- scription volume for the widow of a publisher who had cheated him.