A House to Let

"A House to Let" is a novella written as collaborative fiction by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter.

[2][3] "A House to Let" was the first collaboration between the four writers, although Collins and Dickens had worked with Procter on previous Christmas stories for the magazine in 1854, 1855, and 1856.

The four authors would write together again in 1859's "The Haunted House" which appeared in the extra Christmas number of All the Year Round, the successor to Household Words which Dickens had started after a dispute with his publishers.

In a letter to Collins from 6 September 1858, Dickens outlined his idea for a Christmas story.

The plot concerns an elderly woman, Sophonisba, who notices signs of life in a supposedly empty dilapidated house (the eponymous "House to Let") opposite her own and employs the efforts of an elderly admirer, Jabez Jarber, and her servant, Trottle, to discover what is happening within.