Letters of Charles Dickens

Exceptions were made for begging letters, which his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth answered, and for routine business connected with his two magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round, which was handled by his assistant editor W. H. Wills, although Dickens preferred to correspond with the contributors himself.

These correspondents include his daughter Katey, Augustus Egg, Chauncy Hare Townshend, Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"), Richard Barham, James Muspratt, and his lover Ellen Ternan.

Attempts at writing a diary seldom lasted long and for the most part the manuscripts are lost, while a memoir of his childhood was discontinued and converted into some of the early chapters of David Copperfield.

[11] They give a unique insight into the way Dickens's processes of composition worked as he wrestled with the novels he published and considered others which were never written, such as the "book whereof the whole story shall be on the top of the Great St.

"[13] The range of subject-matter of the letters is described by his editor, Jenny Hartley: Scotland, Paris, and Venice ... child exploitation, Ragged Schools, and soup kitchens ... the Great Exhibition, women smoking, and dresses for reformed prostitutes ... ravens, waistcoats, and recipes for punch ... mesmerism and dreams ... terrible acting and wonderful children's birthday parties".

Moreover, Dexter's editorial practices were far from rigorous: there was hardly any annotation, and many of the letters were simply copied from previous editions rather than from the originals, with the inevitable result that the texts were not always accurate.

[24][25] In 1949 the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis set a new edition in motion, with a grant of £6000 from the Pilgrim Trust and the Dickens scholar Humphry House in place as editor.

[31] Dissenting voices have been few, and though Joel J. Brattin noted that there were some errors and omissions of transcription he endorsed it as being in general extremely accurate, and thought the project as a whole "of incomparable value".

They have also been made accessible online by the Charles Dickens Letters Project, and it is intended eventually to publish a supplementary volume to the Pilgrim Edition.

[36] The scholar John Espey wrote that this selection constitutes "a full review of almost all that we know of Dickens's activities as editor, public figure, father, husband, lecturer and lover", and that it "should satisfy for some time both the general reader and the specialist".

Claire Harman, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, welcomed it with enthusiasm, while noting the sparse annotation and the fact that Hartley had chosen a representative selection of the letters, including a few rather trivial ones, rather than "a series of epistolary knock-out blows".

[38] Boyd Tonkin, in the Independent, found it to be "edited with unobtrusive intelligence and insight",[39] Joyce Carol Oates thought it "more revealing and more intimate than any biography",[40] and the critic Nicholas Lezard recommended it in the Guardian with the words, "The whole book bursts with the author’s energy, and you will love him and know him better after reading even a few of these letters.

"[41] Also in 2012, a 4-hour audiobook was issued by Naxos under the title Charles Dickens: A Portrait in Letters, the readers being David Timson and Simon Callow.