I Am Transported beyond the Ignorant Copperfieldian Present

The sixth volume of The Letters of Charles Dickens advances the Pilgrim edition by 1,588 letters, 641 published for the first time, and the life of the novelist by three years, from January 1, 1850, to December 31, 1852.1 These were productive years for Dickens, since they include monthly writing of the second half of David Copperfield and the first half of Bleak House, the commencement of his weekly magazine Household Words, and much more; and many readers will share my wish that the Clarendon Press would bring out these expertly annotated and indexed volumes more swiftly (the fifth appeared in 1981). This volume provides the widest window to date upon a significant turn in literary history, the turn to the later novels of Dickens-though anyone who read carefully merely the first chapter of Bleak House knew that something pretty tremendous was afoot. The surviving letters tell rather little about the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park or the funeral of the duke of Wellington-shows that Dickens heartily despised. They tell not nearly as much as one would like about the death of his father, John Dickens; or his first acquaintance with a new friend, Wilkie Collins; or the final performances as Lear and Macbeth by an old friend, William Charles Macready. They intimate almost nothing of the persons one wishes to know most about, the deeply allied protagonists "Trotwood" Copperfield and "Dame Trot" Summerson. But the many letters devoted to the operations of Household Words on the one hand, and of the home for fallen women in Shepherd's Bush on the other-"the Bush" (p. 167), as Dickens calls it in one report to Angela Burdett Coutts, who put up the money for the project-tell of unceasing expenditure of energy in behind-the-scenes management akin to writing novels on a serial basis. These additional activities were routine only in the sense that they were rhythmic and incessant: a routine of striving to be new at the editorial office and a routine of surprises held in store at the Bush. Along with the routine of writing enormously original novels, they show a commitment to doing what was useful and right, both to himself and to the public benefiting from the management, whether the large number of readers reading or the small number of women preparing for emigration. As he wrote to one potential contributor to Household Words, "all social evils, and all home affections and associations" (p. 41) were to be the concern of the new magazine, and this expressed dichotomy became a standard one for nineteenth-century life and letters. Meanwhile Dickens never seems to have stopped going except when he went for long walks, the pleasure of which is attested by the unfailing cheer of invitations to friends like Mark Lemon or John Leech to join him. When he walked by himself, presumably, he was working. Dickens had learned to discipline himself well to writing in the mornings when a novel was being put to paper. Even so he had to relieve his steady application to nineteen monthly installments by some changes of scene-to Broadstairs and to Dover and Boulogne for the novels in question here. He took a sizable break between