The British Academy Pilgrim Edition: The Letters of Charles Dickens (1965–2002), from which the text for this selection is taken, started to take shape in the late 1940s. Half a century in the making, it is the fruit of twelve editors, including associate and assistant editors. Their painstaking labour combines research, scholarship, and deep immersion in the period, together with the perseverance and ingenuity necessary to track letters down, and the detective work and skill to date them.
The Pilgrim Editors aimed to publish every known letter by Dickens, in as complete a form as possible. Earlier editors worked to different rules. John Forster, Dickens’s close friend and first biographer, quoted from nearly a thousand letters to him from Dickens, and claimed that as many again ‘had to be put aside’. For those he used he adopted a cut-and-paste technique, subsequently destroying both the discarded fragments and practically all the set-aside letters. The manuscript of his biography no longer exists, and fewer than 200 letters to Forster survive. In the judgement of the Pilgrim Editors, ‘Wherever he could improve on his originals Forster apparently thought he had a right to do so.’ Not unusual for his time, Forster’s was what the later biographer Edgar Johnson characterized as ‘a very cavalier attitude to all correspondence’. The first collection of Dickens’s letters, by his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth and daughter Mamie, also bore the marks of strong editorial practice. ‘Too entirely personal to be suitable for publication’ was the reason Georgina gave for rejecting a letter offered to them. Letters they chose were ‘cut and condensed remorselessly’.1 Subsequent editors presented letters to single correspondents such as Angela Burdett Coutts, W. H. Wills, John Leech, Thomas Beard, Clarkson Stanfield, and Mark Lemon. The Pilgrim Edition continues to grow, with newly surfacing letters published as Supplements in The Dickensian.
In this selection, the correspondence from the American trip in 1842 and Italy in 1844–5 is under-represented, because it was quarried by Dickens himself for American Notes and Pictures from Italy. All letters are reproduced from the Pilgrim Edition in the most complete version we have them. I have, however, sometimes cut letters to Forster, since they have already been cut and edited by Forster. The italicized explanatory passages in and heading letters to Forster have been extracted by Pilgrim editors from his biography. Throughout, Dickens’s underlinings are reproduced as italics; double underlining as capital letters.
1 See John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 817; Edgar Johnson, ‘The Art of Biography, An Interview with Edgar Johnson’, conducted by Fred Kaplan, Dickens Studies Annual, 1980, 1–38; preface to Pilgrim 1. The preface to Pilgrim 1 also describes previous editorial practices, and the Pilgrim rules of transcription.
Finally, a note on the notes. They are, for the most part, much abbreviated versions of the Pilgrim notes. I have tried to keep them brief, in order to include as many letters as possible.