As a language pedant, I find it very irritating when I post about Dickens or Shakespeare and some wag pops into my mentions to scold me for demanding that people read books in “Old English.” This happens more often than you would expect. Most egregiously, a widely derided post last year argued that we need to “modernize” all books written before 1970 (!) to make them readable for today’s readers. One pictures a man of thirty-five, an Andrew Tate acolyte with a brain scrambled by ChatGPT, attempting to decipher Beezus and Ramona with the resolve of a novice monk hunched over a manuscript by Bede. You see this eagerness to simplify language manifesting everywhere: an AI app known as Magibook promises to “turn hard books into easy books,” and alters the famous first line of The Great Gatsby to read, “When I was young, my dad told me something that I still think about.” Ugh.

One almost can’t help but despair. A part of me dies whenever someone accuses Jane Austen of writing in Old English because it suggests that person hasn’t encountered actual Old English. And I think that’s sad, and I think it’s a shame, because I find the language of Aelfric and Bede and the Beowulf poet to be exceptionally beautiful, to the degree that I’m actively teaching myself to read and speak it. Here, for example, is a translation of the Lord’s Prayer dating from about 995:

I think folks who have never seen Old English in the wild can glance at this and feel tempted to give up straightaway, feeling hopelessly confused. What trips them up is the pronunciation, which differs slightly from ours, and the presence of an additional letter, the thorn, that letter you see at the beginning of the third and fourth words and which forms a “th” sound. Also worth noting: f’s that appear between two vowels—like the f in “heofonum” and “yfele”—are pronounced like v’s. G appearing before i, e or ae is pronounced like modern y. Once you know this, the prayer begins to look a bit more recognizable: for example, you can probably discern that “eorÞan” is “earth” and “heofonum” is “heaven.” The wonderful thing about Old English is that it is, in fact, English.

My excellent friend Rachel Christine shared a link to a video of someone reading this version of the Lord’s Prayer aloud, so you can get a sense of the proper pronunciation and the beauty of the spoken words:

Here’s a second translation of the Lord’s Prayer, this one from the Lindesfarne Gospels circa 940:

Those mysterious symbols that resemble sevens throughout the text are abbreviated “and”s—essentially early ampersands. The slashed symbol at the end of the first two lines is a scribal gloss indicating that two different renderings of the line are being offered for the reader to choose from.

Moving ahead a few hundred years, here’s John Wycliffe’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Middle English circa 1380:

You’ll notice that it’s much more recognizably modern; you should be able to read and understand most words in the text without a great deal of difficulty. The only thing that might trip you up is the presence of the letter yogh, which flickered briefly into English during the late medieval period before disappearing. I quite like the Wycliffe Bible; I think it’s charming, and the language is much simpler than that of Chaucer or, especially, the Gawain poet so it’s an excellent point of entry for those seeking the door into the garden of Middle English.

Below the jump, we’ll chat about the Lord’s Prayer of 1611.

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Friends,

It is delightful to be back with you on this journey through the twelve volumes of the Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens! This month, we’re beginning Volume Two—the only one which is a reread for me, as it was the first one I acquired (at about six dollars!), before Boze and I eventually landed the whole set.

“This volume begins with preparations for Master Humphrey’s Clock, includes the first public dinner given in his honour and his tour of the Highlands, and ends on the eve of his departure for America,” writes Madeleine House and Graham Storey, editors of the Pilgrim Edition, in the Preface (vii). This volume covers 1840-41, and today we’ll be looking at 1840.

Dickens’s Friendships in 1840

“The years 1840-41 were a period in which Dickens’s social life was rapidly expanding and he made or consolidated some of the most important friendships of his life. Maclise and Macready both became firmer friends; through Forster he met and won the affection of Landor; Lord Jeffrey became his fervent admirer; Miss Burdett Coutts took him up socially, thus beginning their long association….

“Forster’s importance to Dickens was now paramount….he was Dickens’s boon companion and his representative in complicated publishing negotiations with both Richard Bentley and Chapman & Hall. He read the proofs of Master Humphrey’s Clock, and was frequently given carte blanche to make deletions and minor alterations. And it was on his suggestion that Dickens decided that Nell was to die.”

~Madeleine House & Graham Storey, Preface to The Letters of Charles Dickens, vii-viii

Dear Forster. This is the man of whom Thomas Carlyle would write, the following year, that he “is a most noisy man, but really rather a good fellow (as one gradually finds), and with some substance in his tumultuary brains” (see footnote 2, pg. 1). As always, Forster is part of Dickens’s daily life, and in early to mid-1840 was a great asset to Dickens in the negotiations between Chapman & Hall and Dickens’s old enemy, Richard Bentley, to acquire the copyright to Oliver, and make terms about the publication agreement (with C & H) for Barnaby Rudge. In July, Dickens gifts Forster with a beautifully-worked antique claret jug, with a note of friendship and gratitude, acknowledging also that “my heart is not an eloquent one on matters which touch it most” (97).

Interestingly, there was a genuine spat between the men in August of that year—a painful dinner scene at which not only was Forster present, but so were Macready, Maclise, and Kate. Macready wrote in his diary: “Forster got on to one of his headlong streams of talk (which he thinks argument) and waxed warm, and at last some sharp observations led to personal retorts between him and Dickens” (116). What the nature of the comments were, I am not sure, but the upshot was that “Mrs Dickens had gone out in tears” (116). Dickens writes of the scene to Macready, expressing his gratitude for Macready’s friendship, and complaining of Forster’s “manner” more than the “matter” of which he spoke: “I feel confident in the belief that there is no man, alive or dead, who tried his friends as he [Forster] does. I declare to you solemnly, that when I think of his manner (far worse than his matter) I turn burning hot, and am ashamed and in a manner degraded to have been the subject of it” (116).

Things must have become reconciled fairly quickly, however, as Dickens gets right back to writing to Forster of various matters concerning the Clock and The Old Curiosity Shop with nearly as much vivacity as ever.

The saga with John Overs continues. For the most part, Dickens is writing with concern and friendliness for Overs’s welfare as an author, and with a wish to assist him in his endeavors. There isn’t anything resembling a sour note until late-October, when Dickens defends his friend Samuel Rogers from a potentially scandalous story about Rogers which Overs had heard from another. Dickens still writes, however, in friendliness, considering that the story was only told by a third party, and with a wish to defend his friend, and without putting blame on Overs. (Dickens’s increasing annoyance with Overs will begin the following year.)

Dickens writes more and more frequently to both Maclise and Macready, who are becoming part of his inner circle. We also find in 1840 letters to Leigh Hunt and Lady Blessington—the latter controversial figure had asked Dickens to write for her Annual, which he showed great finesse in politely declining, as he had so much pressing work of his own at the time.

At about this time, we begin to find letters to Walter Savage Landor—the real-life Boythorn from Bleak House, and after whom Dickens named one of his children. The men seemed to get on like a house on fire, Landor having a very Boythornesque way of describing his sentiments in the most robust and melodramatic ways, full of natural enthusiasm and loyalty. In a letter to Forster before Landor and Dickens met in person, Landor had written, “Tell [Dickens] he has drawn from me more tears and more smiles than are remaining to me for all the rest of the world, real or ideal” (23).

Later, Crabb Robinson would write of his impression of Landor following their first meeting:

“He was…a leonine man, and with a fierceness of tone well suited to his name; his decisions being confident, and on all subjects, whether of taste or life, unqualified…But why should I trouble myself to describe him? He is painted by a master hand in Dickens’s novel, ‘Bleak House’, now in course of publication…The combination of superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness, so so admirably portrayed in ‘Bleak House’, still at first strikes every stranger” (36).

Dickens’s crush on Queen Victoria

In February, Dickens begins writing delightfully ridiculous letters to Landor and Forster about how “unhinged” he is by Queen Victoria’s marriage, as he has “fallen hopelessly in love” with her (23). The whole thing seems to have been a big joke—humorous, with a hint of seriousness—between Landor, Dickens, Forster, and Maclise. It is worth quoting both letters in full:

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“The comfort is, that all the ‘strange and terrible’ things come uppermost, and that the good and pleasant things are mixed up with every moment of our existence so plentifully that we scarcely heed them.”
~Dickens to John Forster, January 1839 (489)

In 1839, Dickens, working on his delightfully theatrical novel, Nicholas Nickleby, is having a sort of “theatrical” year altogether…

The Ongoing Saga with Bentley & Barnaby; a cooling in the friendship with Ainsworth?

Dickens was still involved in arguments regarding Bentley in 1839. In December, he writes of Bentley, to his friend Thomas Beard, as “the Burlington street brigand” (619).

A letter to Forster from early in the year illuminates something of why writing Barnaby Rudge continued to be an ongoing struggle for Dickens, and why he wanted to extricate it, and himself, from any agreement with Bentley:

“It is no fiction to say that at present I cannot write this tale. The immense profits which Oliver has realised to its publisher, and is still realising; the paltry, wretched, miserable sum it brought to me (not equal to what is every day paid for a novel that sells fifteen hundred copies at most); the recollection of this, and the consciousness that I have still the slavery and drudgery of another work on the same journeyman-terms; the consciousness that my books are enriching everybody connected with them but myself, and that I, with such a popularity as I have acquired, am struggling in old toils, and wasting my energies in the very height and freshness of my fame, and the best part of my life, to fill the pockets of others, while for those who are nearest and dearest to me I can realise little more than a genteel subsistence: all this puts me out of heart and spirits: and I cannot—cannot and will not—under such circumstances that keep me down with an iron hand, distress myself by beginning this tale until I have had time to breathe; and until the intervention of the summer, and some cheerful days in the country, shall have restored me to a more genial and composed state of feeling. There—for six months Barnaby Rudge stands over. And but for you, it should stand over altogether. For I do most solemnly declare that morally, before God and man, I hold myself released from such hard bargains as these, after I have done so much for those who drove them. This net that has been wound about me so chafes me, so exasperates and irritates my mind, that to break it at whatever cost—that I should care nothing for—is my constant impulse” (493-94).

As we near the end of the year, however, Dickens is finally making some progress on Barnaby Rudge, though “not at racehorse speed” (605).

Just as he was extricating himself from agreements with Richard Bentley in early 1839, and his own editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany, he was urging his friend and fellow novelist, Harrison Ainsworth, to take his place, and helped make arrangements for it. (I was very surprised at the effusive way in which Dickens recommends the job to Ainsworth, considering his own low regard for Bentley—perhaps he was in some further way trying to extricate himself from responsibility by finding a suitable replacement?)

Ainsworth did take over the editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany, and Bentley began publishing his novel Jack Sheppard in serial form that January.

I’ve been looking for a biography of Ainsworth that I have misplaced, but it would be interesting to know more about the man who “outsold Dickens,” as the title tantalizingly proclaims, who wrote such nearly-forgotten novels as Rookwood and Jack Sheppard. The author of the Ainsworth biography, Stephen Carver, has a fascinating article about how “Dickens’s greatest rival,” as he calls Ainsworth, built his reputation on novels about criminals such as highwayman Dick Turpin or the jailbreaking Jack Sheppard, and “the publication of ‘Rookwood’ by Richard Bentley turned Ainsworth into a celebrity virtually overnight, creating a fashionable craze for highwaymen fed by penny dreadful knock-offs and unlicensed theatrical adaptations.” There was a cost to writing such sensational fare, or “Newgate novels,” as they were called. Dickens was looking up to Ainsworth as a successful novelist while still writing his own London sketches prior to Pickwick, and, according to Carver, John Forster was in the minority in thinking that Ainsworth’s Rookwood was “vulgar and socially dangerous”—but his view took hold.

When Jack Sheppard appeared around the time of Oliver Twist, Forster wrote a scathing review. With the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837, the “moral panic” that became known as the “Newgate Controversy” about the effects of such novels began in earnest.

Carver writes:

“This theory was apparently borne out on 5 May 1840, when retired M.P. Lord William Russell was murdered in his bed by his valet, François Courvoisier, who claimed to have got the idea by reading ‘Jack Sheppard’.”

Rival or not, Ainsworth and Dickens had started out on a very friendly footing, with Dickens moving more and more in the same social circles. In late March, however, some general misunderstanding—which Dickens was trying to put right—about Forster’s involvement (or not) with a disagreement vis-à-vis Bentley prompted Dickens to write a very forthright, and almost harsh, letter to Ainsworth, pleading with him to set their mutual friend’s reputation back on a proper footing, and acknowledge that he (Forster) had had nothing to do with…whatever it was. (I am trying to find more information on what exactly the source of the complaint was.)

Whatever the case, I am curious to see whether this letter will prove to represent the beginning of the cooling of their relationship. At the end of the year, Dickens does write to a persistent (and, to Dickens, a persistently annoying) aspiring author, J.A. Overs (more on this below) that he himself is not on the kind of terms with Ainsworth to pass along his (Overs’s) work to him. Whether this is done to politely get rid of Overs’s solicitations, or because of his own cooling relationship with Ainsworth, I am not sure. Certainly, though, I notice two additional things: first, in Dickens’s short, practical diary entries in 1839 (in an appendix), there were quite a number of dinings with Ainsworth mentioned early in the year, but none after March; secondly, I do not see any more letters from Dickens to Ainsworth—after that biting one about rectifying the matter concerning Forster’s reputation—throughout the rest of 1839.

On “Moral” Tales

Dickens, a thorough believer, was nonetheless opposed to any kind of didacticism in literature, whether for children or adults. Especially if it was one that promoted anything like a harsh view of God to innocent children’s minds.

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Dickens’s tour of the Yorkshire schools; the “ghost” of Smike

Boze and I just finished our annual rewatch of my favorite thing ever to be put on film: the legendary 8 ½ hour stage production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby from 1982. This has become a tradition between Thanksgiving and Christmas; it is not only a perfect holiday watch, but it is the ultimate Dickensian romp.

In 1980-81, the Royal Shakespeare Company, in desperate financial straits, decided to pull out all the stops and create a theatrical experience like no other—the kind that can change one’s life, even if you’re watching it filmed, decades later. For my full tribute to the great Roger Rees (who played the nineteen-year-old Nicholas at nearly forty years old, so brilliantly), and to this majestic production, here’s a link to our Dickens Club essay.

And at least for now, you can still find the entire production on YouTube.

“Ultimately, this joyous Bildungsroman is a love letter to the theatre itself, to friendship and family, and to the ideal of taking a hand in lifting up those who are suffering; the willingness to bring others into our family and our hearts, even if we suspect it will bring heartbreak and loss. A love letter to the ideal that love always triumphs, and that generosity of heart is always worth the cost.”

~From my essay, “Remembering Roger Rees, and his Nicholas Nickleby”

Why do I lead with this? Mostly, because as Dickens bounds into 1838, he begins that delightful serial novel, Nicholas Nickleby. Boze wrote, in his introduction to Nicholas Nickleby for our Dickens Club readalong of the book in 2022: “in this book he [Dickens] weds the comedy of Pickwick and the pathos and melodrama of Oliver Twist with electrifying results. This is a hefty, hilarious, often very dark book, full of incident and eccentrics.”

How did the conception of Nickleby begin?

By late January of 1838, after a difficult month of several tasks that became a bit tiresome for Dickens (editing the memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, working on the Miscellany, a section of Oliver, and Sketches for Young Gentlemen for Chapman & Hall), he writes to his friend and fellow novelist Harrison Ainsworth, expressing his excitement about an upcoming secret “pilgrimage to the cheap schools of Yorkshire” (359). There were varying degrees of dreadful in these “cheap schools”; but all of them, as the Pilgrim editors write in a footnote, “suffered from CD’s picture of Dotheboys Hall” in Nicholas Nickleby, which this pilgrimage was preparing him for (359). Squeers’s advertisement sounds very similar to those of other schools which Dickens toured; the Pilgrim editors inform us of the almost double cost for “guaranteeing ‘separate beds’” for the boys to be boarded; the phrase “No extras, no vacations” was disturbingly “common” among such advertisements (411).

Peter Ackroyd writes:

“He [Dickens] remained ‘curious’ about these schools, which were in many instances nothing but convenient dustbins for unwanted children, bastards or orphans; the advertisements for them often included the chilling words, ‘No Vacations’, which meant that the children were retained there indefinitely. And the conditions, to judge by contemporary reports, were often as harsh as it is possible to conceive. Clearly Dickens had been encouraged by the success of his topical allusions in Oliver Twist, and determined that he could direct his polemic against new targets: the idea of poor children being almost literally imprisoned in squalid conditions, and of being tyrannised by brutal adults, was one that in any case struck to the centre of his imagination. So once again his childhood reading, and the memories or fantasies of his own childhood, helped to fashion his ideas for a new novel; the inter-animating process had begun. He became ‘bent upon destroying’ the Yorkshire schools, and, with that aim in mind, he concocted a scheme in which he would pose as the friend of a widowed mother who wished to place her child in just such an establishment….a legal colleague of Thomas Mitton knew a lawyer who practised in that Northern neighborhood, and he gave Dickens a letter of introduction” (250).

Under an assumed name, Dickens made his tour. Though he spent only two days there, it was enough.

At the end of December 1838, Dickens answers a letter to the writer and philanthropist Anna Maria Hall, related to the realities behind Dotheboys Hall, which Dickens claims to have downplayed in the novel, as the real horror would have been too much to bear for most readers:

“Depend upon it that the rascalities of those Yorkshire schoolmasters cannot easily be exaggerated, and that I have kept down the strong truth and thrown as much comicality over it as I could, rather than disgust and weary the reader with its fouler aspects. The identical scoundrel you speak of, I saw—curiously enough. His name is Shaw….and if I am not much mistaken, another action was brought against him by the parents of a miserable child, a cancer in whose head he opened with an inky penknife, and so caused his death. The country for miles around was covered, when I was there, with deep snow. There is an old Church near the school, and the first grave-stone I stumbled on that dreary winter afternoon was placed above the grave of a boy, eighteen long years old, who had died—suddenly, the inscription said; I suppose his heart broke….at that wretched place. I think his ghost put Smike into my head, upon the spot” (481-82).

A busy year…

During this time, Dickens still has his moments of fuming at Richard Bentley for shortchanging him. He makes amendments to his Will with Thomas Mitton (413-414). He writes in August to his old schoolmaster, Rev. William Giles, gifting him his completed published works so far—Sketches and Pickwick (429). He begins a written acquaintance with John Wiley and George Putnam, the New York publishers who not only published Hazlitt and Lamb, but will publish, according to the Pilgrim editors, “Pictures from Italy, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Chimes and Dombey and Son” (430). To them Dickens expresses interest in visiting America before long.

Peter Ackroyd drew my attention to the fact that Dickens had, in January of 1838, attempted keeping a diary, though the effort to keep a more detailed one didn’t last long. It barely lasts two weeks, when in mid-January he writes:

I’m thankful the Pilgrim edition has his diary entries in an appendix of the book; I’m also delighted that Dickens does continue to keep it through the year, even if each entry after January fifteenth is little more than one line, or even, one word: “Work.”

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Was this the best reading year of my life?

This late in life, I’m not sure any year could surpass 2005 (when I read Pickwick Papers, the Arabian Nights, six Harry Potter books and thirty-six plays by William Shakespeare) or 2006 (Gormenghast, Les Miserables, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, the first half of The Faerie Queene, &c. &c.). But it’s been, by any measure, an extraordinary year. Living again within walking distance of a university library, I felt, in Melville’s phrase, as if “the floodgates of the wonder-world swung open.” I read epistolary novels, illustrated diaries, medieval bestiaries, books on the lore of monsters in Anglo-Saxon literature, pop science books on the prehistoric world, classic collections of poetry and short stories, books of Welsh, English, Scottish and Scandinavian folklore, a retelling of Oliver Twist from the perspective of Fagin, a contemporary thriller about the time of King Alfred... the list goes on and on. I’m hard-pressed to think of any previous year in which I read almost a book per day. (Here’s how I did it.)

All that to say: I don’t want you to ever feel that reading is a terrible burden, a chore to be endured, like working out or eating vegetables at dinner. Reading is fun; and the pursuit of knowledge is perhaps the most purely enjoyable thing one can do in this world. I’m not an exceptional reader. I believe you’re capable of reading broadly and often. Let this next year be the year in which you rediscover the magic and power of deep reading.

Let’s begin.

10. The Kingdoms of Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

A series of short stories involving various faerie kingdoms, in which Warner invents her own lore with breathless assurance. These aren’t the sentimental faeries of recent fiction; every page brims with a sense of the uncanny. We wouldn’t have Susanna Clarke without this book.

09. The Magic Apple Tree: A Country Year, by Susan Hill

Not a fantasy novel but a memoir of a year spent in the country outside of Oxford. Owls perch, pies are baked, fog rises from the fens and fox-cubs shriek in gardens on cold nights. For anyone who’s ever dreamed of living in rural England, this book is generous and rich.

08. The Norse Myths, by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Writing of the moment he discovered the Norse myths as a child, C. S. Lewis wrote, “Pure Northerness engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of northern summer.” This is the best modern retelling, lucid and substantial.

07. The Fugitive (Book Six of In Search of Lost Time), by Marcel Proust

In this penultimate volume, the narrator suffers a devastating loss, which provides occasion for reflections on memory, love, grief, perception and the prospect of a life to come. Seemingly minor moments from earlier volumes return like a musical motif. The effect is stunning.

06. Phantastes, by George MacDonald

C. S. Lewis finally coaxed me into reading this wonderfully hallucinatory novel that feels at times like a grown-up version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. There are scenes and images that stun with their dream-like, almost hypnotic power. A book to be puzzled over and savored.

05. Dream of the Red Chamber / Story of the Stone (Book 01), by Cao Xeuqin

There’s a lovely coming-of-age story here about a group of children growing up in Qing-era China, but the most striking thing about the book is its setting: rain-soaked gardens, gilded dragons, cedar- & sandalwood, tea and incense. The atmosphere it conjures is unsurpassed.

04. The Icelandic Sagas

Of the 41 Sagas, I’ve read about a dozen. Standouts were Grettir the Strong—a tale of doomed outlaws and a shepherd possessed by the very revenant he sought to defeat—and the Eyrbyggja Saga, featuring ghost seals, phantom moons, and the spirit of a woman who cooks in the nude.

03. O Caledonia, by Elspeth Barker

Early in Barker’s only novel we learn that Janet, her book-obsessed protagonist, is doomed to be murdered at 16. The subsequent pages narrate her brief, adventurous life in the Scottish Highlands. Janet is one of literature’s great heroines, a clear influence on Flavia de Luce.

02. The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

I find it rather eerie how this book, the second in a sequence, features all my most niche obsessions: medieval carols, recorders, bells, time travel, visions of old England covered in snowy woods. Reading the book felt like coming home to all that’s good and sane.

01. Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year, by Eleanor Parker

There are a handful of books to which one can date the beginning of a new chapter in one’s life, and no book I read this year had a greater effect on me. Rach and I listened to it on audio whilst confined to our house during a week of snowstorms and it awoke in me a fascination with English landscape, Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the ritual year that colored all my subsequent reading. Like the stories of Tolkien, it has a way of shocking you awake with beauties and traditions half-forgotten and summoning you to a deeper and more intentional way of living. I suspect I’ll be reading and brooding over it for the rest of my life.

“Her body lies in the beautiful cemetery in the Harrow Road. I saw her grave but a few days ago, and the grass around it was as green and the flowers as bright, as if nothing of the earth in which they grew could ever wither or fade. Beneath my feet there lay a silent but solemn witness that all health and beauty are but things of the hour.”

~ Dickens to an “unknown correspondent” of early June, 1837 (268)

Friends and fellow Dickensians,

During this period of mid- to late-1837, Dickens is finishing Pickwick and continuing Oliver Twist, all the while trying to make arrangements for Barnaby Rudge—more below on the dramatic disagreements with Richard Bentley on this—which will still take Dickens far longer to work on and complete than he anticipates.

First, I’d like to take a look back at our previous installment of Dispatches from Dickens….

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“To remember happiness which cannot be restored, is pain, but of a softened kind…and memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between this world and a better.”

~Nicholas Nickleby

As we approach the Spring of 1837, Dickens and Catherine are engaged “in the pleasant occupation of ‘moving,’”—clearly meant with a heavy dose of sarcasm—into No 48 Doughty Street (current home of the Dickens Museum) and are writing to upholsterers and dealing with other practical matters in reference to their new home. The editors of the Pilgrim letters speculate that they likely moved in the weekend of 31 March to 2 April (244).

Dickens is also writing delightfully whimsical suggestions to his illustrators. For example, he wrote to Phiz on Pickwick:

“Winkle should be holding the Candlestick above his head I think. It looks more comical, the light having gone out.

A fat chairman so short as our friend here, never drew breath in Bath. A would leave him where he is, decidedly. Is the lady full dressed? She ought to be.”

~pg. 242

While Dickens works on the latter stages of The Pickwick Papers for Chapman & Hall, he is still in the early stages of writing Oliver Twist in serial form for Bentley’s Miscellany and dealing with matters related to The Village Coquettes. Dickens is also thick into the editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany, sending or rejecting pieces for publication in it and making suggestions to Richard Bentley. There are many other business matters that occupy Dickens’s time in addition. It is interesting to note that, in a letter to J.P. Harley around this time (in response to a request to write a new play for the St. James’s Theatre) Dickens writes that he could not do a one-act piece for under £100, and a two-act piece would require not less that £150: “I do not know whether, with reference to arrangements that are made with any other writers, this may or may not appear a large sum. I state it merely with regard to the value of my own time and writings at this moment—and in so doing, I assure you I place the remuneration below the mark rather than above it” (254).

Dickens also continues to cultivate the new friendship of John Forster, presenting him in late-March with a gift of some used volumes “as a very small testimony of the donor’s regard and obligations, as well as of his desire to cultivate and avail himself of a friendship which has been so pleasantly thrown in his way” (243).

In early May, however, tragedy comes to the new Dickens home.

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We have Dickens’s first letter on this subject written to Edward Chapman of Chapman & Hall:

Mary Hogarth, young sister of Dickens’s wife, had been living with the newly-married couple at their new home on Doughty Street. Mary’s death—coming so suddenly after a visit to the theater that night, was a complete shock. Dickens writes to George Thomson on 8 May (the day following her death):

“The medical men are of opinion that her heart had been diseased for a great length of time. Her general state of health, and above all the awful suddenness of her death induce me to think they are right.

You cannot conceive the misery in which this dreadful event has plunged us. Since our marriage she has been the grace and life of our home—the admired of all, for her beauty and excellence—I could have better spared a much nearer relation or an older friend, for she has been to us what we can never replace…”

~pg. 257

In a letter of late-May, once Dickens had been able to write more calmly and at length, he described the circumstances just before her death to Richard Johns, a writer and former lieutenant in the Royal Marines:

“On the day previous to that on which you dined with us she [Mary] had gone home to see her Mama. On the day after, she returned. On the Saturday Evening we went to the Saint James’s Theatre; she went up stairs to bed at about one o’Clock in perfect health and her usual delightful spirits; was taken ill before she had undressed; and died in my arms next afternoon at 3 o’Clock. Everything that could possibly be done was done but nothing could save her. The medical men imagine it was a disease of the heart.”

~pg. 263

Catherine was in deep distress, and Dickens writes of her valiant good-heartedness in having to console Mary and Catherine’s mother in the midst of her own grief. Dickens writes to Richard Johns: “I should have said that the affliction we have suffered brought on a miscarriage but that she [Catherine] has perfectly recovered from it” (264).

Dickens writes a number of letters in May 1837, to inform friends of her death. He writes to Edward Chapman that “I feel that as tomorrow [the funeral] draws nigh, the bitterest part of this calamity is at hand. I hope that for that one day at all events I may be able to bear my part in it with fortitude, and to encourage and console those about me—it will be no harder time to anyone than myself” (259). To Ainsworth he writes of how “unnerved and hurt” he has been “by the loss of the dear girl whom I loved, after my wife, more deeply and fervently than anyone on earth” (260). He writes to Thomas Beard in a similar vein: “Of our sufferings at the time [of Mary’s death], and all through the dreary week that ensued, I will say nothing—no one can imagine what they were. You have seen a good deal of her, and can feel for us, and imagine what a blank she has left behind….I solemnly believe that so perfect a creature never breathed. I knew her inmost heart, and her real worth and value. She had not a fault” (259).

Dickens had written to Richard Bentley: “I have given the Printer matter to go on with, and tomorrow or at furthest next day, will send him more. I must entreat you to spare me in the meanwhile” (258). It was the first time that Dickens took some time away from his serial novels, as he informs Thomas Beard: “I have been so shaken and unnerved by the loss of one whom I so dearly loved that I have been compelled to lay aside all thoughts of my usual monthly work, for once”—and the editors add in a footnote that “there was no June No. of either Pickwick or Oliver” (260). It was the only time Dickens allowed himself such a release of scheduled commitments. Dickens will, as he writes to Ainsworth, “try a fortnight’s rest and quiet. We have hired a very small cottage here [Collin’s Farm, Hampstead], and have repaired hither for a little change of air and scene” (260).

It was as though he mourned the closest of wives or sisters. This profound love and sense of loss remains something of an enigma, as we have very little knowledge of the daily interactions between Dickens and Mary. (Dickens’s letters to the Hogarths, prior to his marriage to Catherine, seem all to have been to Catherine or her father.) G.K. Chesterton went so far as to say—perhaps in a quasi-humorous attempt to soften or justify Dickens in his poor treatment of Catherine later in life—that Dickens had accidentally married the wrong sister, as though Catherine and Mary had taken him in by a Shakespearean bed-switching trick.

Dickens was always one haunted by the past, by memory. His early experiences at the blacking factory and his father’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea, though kept from nearly all of even his closest friends, was to mark his psyche and his works for the rest of his life. When Boze and I were running the Dickens Chronological Reading Club (#DickensClub) from 2022-2024, I wrote an essay on “memory” in the early works of Dickens, calling memory “such a charged and poignant theme in Dickens.” (At the time of my writing, our Club was in the midst of reading his third novel, Nicholas Nickleby.) One passage in particular from my essay might be helpful in the context of Mary’s death, and here I draw heavily from—and often directly quote—the marvelous Peter Acrkoyd, the most lyrical voice on Dickens.

I wrote:

If a character in Dickens preserves the memory of the past, and honors the dead, we can be nearly certain that this character is one we can put our trust in. There is an inherent fidelity suggested by it. For Dickens, the past is always present, and we can be fairly sure that any characters who sneer at memory or grief are not likely to be those we are going to root for.

Mary’s death, according to Ackroyd, “represented the most powerful sense of loss and pain [Dickens] was ever to experience,” and in Dickens’ grief, “amounting almost to hysteria, one senses the essential strangeness of the man. He cut off a lock of Mary Hogarth’s hair and kept it in a special case; he took a ring off her finger, and put it on his own” (Ackroyd 225). This “essential strangeness,” which is key of Ackroyd’s understanding of Dickens, and which he grapples with in a way I haven’t encountered in other biographies, is echoed in Dickens’ words shortly after her death: “Thank God she died in my arms, and the very last words she whispered were of me.” Dickens then had dreams of Mary nightly for the following nine months; something amounting almost to ghostly visitations.

Dickens’ transcendent creativity recalls Mary to life through the written word. We’re only at the beginning of Dickens’ third novel, and haven’t we seen Mary Hogarth three times already? In Rose Maylie, in Kate Nickleby (who, like Rose, is about seventeen when she arrives in London at the opening of the story), and even in Alice, the youngest of the “Five Sisters of York” in the interpolated tale.

In trying to grapple with Mary’s significance to Dickens, Ackroyd argues that, among other things, Dickens’ wife Catherine now represented to Dickens “the adult world of responsibility and work,” while “Mary for him was still a child” with whom his own childhood could be recalled; she became another sister for him; and “after Mary Hogarth’s death there came once more that emptiness, that ache, that yearning perpetually renewed, always fresh and yet always the same, which by his own account became one of the guiding aspects of his life” (226-227).

Ackroyd goes so far as to say that “Dickens’s own religious sensibility began to develop as a result of Mary’s death. It is known that he started regularly to attend the chapel of the Foundling Hospital in Great Coram Street nearby” and “he was consoled ‘above all’ by ‘the thought of one day joining her again where sorrow and separation are unknown’” (Ackroyd 228).

“And hence, too, the religious significance which [Dickens] attached to the concept of memory; as soon as [Mary] was dead he was reminiscing about their lives together. ‘I can recall everything we said and did in those happy days,’ he said, and for him the memory became a blessed faculty aligned with fancy and the imagination, linking the living with the dead and thus earth with heaven; it became a way of infusing reality with spiritual grace…”

~Ackroyd, Dickens, pg. 228

I decided to make this period of letters shorter than I usually cover, as it is so key to understanding Dickens as a man, and his world and works.

Even many years later, while Dickens was in Italy, he would dream vividly of Mary Hogarth coming to him to answer a question he had put to her about faith—specifically, about whether Roman Catholicism were the true faith—and the imagery of the dream appears to combine the figures of Mary Hogarth and the Virgin Mary in a mysterious way.

As things always seem to happen with Dickens’s novels, there is a circularity, a new return of something old or long past. Things come around again, just as Mary Hogarth will continue to reappear in different guises in Dickens’s works, from Little Nell to Amy Dorrit. Even the age of her death—seventeen—will reappear again and again in his novels.

Mr. Lorry says in A Tale of Two Cities: “as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me.”

Perhaps Mary Hogarth would always be not only the consummate, beloved sister and friend, but a fundamental representation of youth and innocence, when “what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me.” Mary would always remain with him, and the echoes of one who was “young, beautiful, and good”—as Dickens himself wrote as an epitaph for her tombstone—would haunt his novels forever.

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim Edition, Volume One: 1820-1839. Edited by Madeleine House and Graham Storey, et al. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965.

What’s the only thing better than buying fourteen books at a library sale for as many dollars? Buying eighty books for a dollar each. Recently Rach and I ordered the Penguin Little Black Classics boxed set, and on Monday evening the books arrived in the post amid a general clamor of rejoicing.

For those who were unaware, this collection was commissioned to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Penguin Classics and features brief selections from longer works published by the imprint. It’s remarkable for the range and scope of the authors included: Chaucer, Herodotus, Kate Chopin, Sophocles, Shen Fu, Hafez, the anonymous author of the Dhammapada, all make appearances. Each volume is individually numbered and the books generally run from fifty to a hundred pages (though, as several people have noted, it’s unfortunate that Penguin couldn’t get the white bars on the spines to line up. We overlook that…)

We celebrated by reading aloud from Book 26, Henry Mayhew’s “Of Street Piemen.” Some years ago we bought the four-volume series of which this is an excerpt, London Labour and the London Poor, and several of the passages were familiar. (“The itinerant trade in pies is one of the most ancient of the street callings of London,” he writes. “The meat pies are made of beef or mutton; the fish pies of eels; the fruit of apples, currants, gooseberries, plums, damsons, cherries, raspberries, or rhubarb, according to the season - and occasionally of mince-meat.”)

This done, we agreed to begin with the first book and read our way through the lot.

The first book, “Mrs. Rosie and the Priest,” features several tales from the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s wonderfully bawdy medieval anthology of devious monks and sexual shenanigans. (The opening page of each book contains a quote introducing the work.)

More photographs (and select passages) after the jump.

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Friends, we have just returned home with an astonishing haul.

We try to visit our local public library, the Ashland Library, every Saturday afternoon because that’s typically when new (used) books are added to the sale table near the front entrance. Some weeks yield little, but previously we have found some treasures: Masterpiece Paintings, The Sagas of Icelanders, The Name of the Rose, several out-of-print books on King Arthur, a beautifully illustrated and slipcased Heritage Press edition of Shakespeare’s Comedies… to name a few. Because we live in a college town (and the home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), elderly book enthusiasts are always donating their rare collections. We have learned to keep an eye out.

But today’s collection might have outdone them all.

I’ve had literal dreams in which I visit the sale table and somehow find every niche book on my wish-list, so I’m not kidding when I tell you that when I began to scan this week’s wares, I briefly wondered if perhaps this was another of those. I believe I actually said aloud, “WHAT IS HAPPENING?!”, startling the gentleman next to me. Several of the books in the above photograph, all of which we ended up purchasing, I have been seeking for weeks or months. I talked myself out of buying a volume of Montaigne’s Complete Essays at Barnes & Noble this past Christmas because it was priced at forty dollars. Likewise with Burton: I regret not buying his masterpiece at a used bookshop that Rach and I perused during our honeymoon in Grant’s Pass last July. Katharine Briggs is one of my favorite folklorists but you can’t find her books anywhere for less than a hundred. On January 30 I wrote in my diary that I had discovered Thistleton Dyer’s Folk-Lore of Shakespeare and was very keen to read it. I’d been thinking of getting Rach one of those London books for Christmas. And so on…

All of these books, all of them, for a dollar each.

I placed my dollars in the collection box and carried the books into the children’s room, where Rach was playing with our four-year-old niece. “You HAVE to go check out the sale table!” I told her. “I’ll watch Eleanor.” Rach drifted off into the other room in a dream-like state. After some discussion with Debra (her mom), we ended up getting seven additional books: Shakespeare and His Sources and six of the seven volumes of Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (the first volume was unavailable).

The children’s librarian, seeing our evident glee, explained that this latest batch had belonged to the private collection of someone who had recently died. They were gifted to the library by a loved one, who had been worried that they wouldn’t sell because they were “too niche.” Enter the two of us. “I was just reading about Sharon Kay Penman,” I told Rach, “the writer of historical fiction who turned her whole home into a highly specialized research library. Let’s make our home into a research library!”

We didn’t buy the books in the following photographs, but we took pictures of the collection in the event that anyone reading happens to be in the area and wants to buy, say, Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theater or Victorian Atlas of the World.

That’s the joy of a library. I suspect that many people don’t read because they wrongly assume that contemporary fiction is the only genre on offer. If you possess a smidgen of curiosity, there are books for every niche interest you might care to cultivate. And then there are golden moments when that curiosity pays off in abundance. In the words of the Ninth Doctor, “I live for days like this.”

And speaking of niche books, check back tomorrow when I’ll be introducing one of my all-time favorite books on Britain’s myths, folklore and legends.

“I have thrown my whole heart and soul into Oliver Twist…”

How did Charles Dickens do it? The sheer volume of work during the period that we are covering (late-1836 and early-1837) is staggering. Still working on Pickwick in serial for Chapman and Hall and beginning Oliver Twist in serial for Bentley’s Miscellany in February of 1837, Dickens was also very involved with the theater due to The Village Coquettes—for which he’d written the libretto—as well as finishing up his editorship of the Morning Chronicle and beginning that of Bentley’s.

Though we don’t have a great deal of reflections directly on Pickwick and the beginning of Oliver Twist (whose first installment appeared in February of 1837), we do know that “I have thrown my whole heart and soul into Oliver Twist, and most confidently believe he will make a feature in the work, and be very popular” (227).

Nor do we have a great deal of very personal-themed correspondence of this period here. But Dickens’s first child, Charley (Charles Culliford Boz Dickens) was born on the sixth of January, 1837.

Dickens was also getting ready to move house after nearly a year of marriage. From March of 1837 to December of 1839, Dickens, Catherine, little Charley, and Catherine’s little sister, Mary Hogarth (until her early, tragic death), would live on Doughty Street, in what is now the marvelous Charles Dickens Museum in London. Due to the expense of the upcoming move, Dickens would, in late February, request a loan from Richard Bentley of £100, against his eventual promised novel, Gabriel Vardon (what would become Barnaby Rudge)—now having extracted himself from the agreement with Macrone of that same promised novel. (The novel was already becoming something of an albatross for Dickens.)

Also notable, on a personal level, during this period is Dickens’s letter to Henry Austin on the 31^st of January, as Dickens sends warm congratulations and approval—with Dickens’s usual humor—of the proposed upcoming wedding between Austin and Dickens’s sister, Letitia:

“I speak most unaffectedly and plainly—when I say, that had I a marriageable daughter (which thank God I have not) of all the young men I know or ever did know, I should delight in seeing her set her cap at you; and when I have one (if ever such an event should happen, which Heaven in its mercy postpone) I only hope she may be fortunate enough to meet your exact copy. As I don’t think you would ‘keep’ until that time, I give you up to Letitia most cheerfully; having the favorite street consolation that you are ‘one of the family’” (232).

But another very important event happened in this period as well, both personally and professionally: in late-1836, Dickens met John Forster, who was to be his closest friend, his trusted partner in business matters, and eventually his biographer.

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“In short, the Dickens novel was popular, not because it was an unreal world, but because it was a real world; a world in which the soul could live. The modern ‘shocker’ at its very best is an interlude in life. But in the days when Dickens’s work was coming out in serial, people talked about it as if real life were itself the interlude between one issue of ‘Pickwick’ and another.”

~G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: The Last of the Great Men

Dickens hadn’t long been married and had his honeymoon when he was thick into work again.

Since his marriage, we of course don’t have samples of letters to Catherine indicating her displeasure at his overwork, but we might well imagine it, for not only was he still at The Morning Chronicle and writing Pickwick, but he was at work on a comic opera, The Village Coquettes, to which he wrote the libretto.

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Judging by recent headlines, the act of reading seems to be in a state of crisis. The average young person spends five and a half hours per day scrolling. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has noted, barring some intervention they are on course to spend twenty-five years of their lives on their phones. The Guardian reported that the youngest cohort of parents are not interested in reading to their kids, finding the practice “boring.”[1]

Their kids, in turn, are not discovering a love of reading—in part because their parents aren’t reading to them, but in part, also, because the education system has adapted to this influx of illiterate students by abandoning the teaching of books in schools. Students at the University of Texas complained about being assigned Hamlet for a class, lamenting that it was too long. In response to students like these, educators are reducing the number of works they teach in a semester or simply dropping the more difficult texts altogether. (A recent essay in the Daily Texan opined, “Professors must find ways to adapt classes to changing student needs by cutting down on reading assignments,” the “student needs” in question being shrinking attention spans from excess phone use.)[2] But few people are asking the obvious question: where will students learn to read if not the classroom? How will they acquire a love of Shakespeare if even their teachers (wrongly, as it happens) think him “difficult” and “boring”? There are days when it feels like the world has abandoned the ideal of teaching children to read entirely.

And it’s not just the young who are at fault here: adults, too, report struggling to focus, being perpetually distracted, having no interest in fiction. It’s as though, after our grand hundred-and-fifty-year experiment in universal education and mass literacy, we’ve decided it simply wasn’t worth the trouble. We’ve given up.

But I do think reading is worth it. The great neurologist Oliver Sacks, in a posthumously published essay, wrote of attending a conference (shortly before his death in 2015) in which a panelist bragged that his teenage daughter spent twelve hours a day online. She, said the panelist, “had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined.” Sacks writes, “I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be well-stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. Half the audience cheered, the other half booed.”[3]

Fast-forward a decade and there are vanishingly few people who would argue that twelve hours on the internet is preferable to twelve hours reading a classic. Post-COVID, there’s a growing awareness that life isn’t meant to be lived online—that, in fact, excess exposure to the digital world can be actively harmful to the brain. “Normal powers of observation and imagination should be sufficient to at least make us wary of smartphones,” writes Clare Coffey, adding, “This is not a world I want to live in. I think it hurts everyone.”[4] Seventy-six percent of the teenagers surveyed in the aforementioned study reported feeling that constant screen use hinders their well-being; 68 percent want to spend less time on phones and social media.

While the addictive nature of these devices makes abstaining difficult, even the desperation to be offline counts as progress of a sort. We no longer talk in rosy terms, as we once did, of the extraordinary information utopia that the internet is bringing into being. For one, that internet no longer exists, if it ever did. The web of the late 2020s is not a conduit for learning but a cesspool of ceaseless entertainment, its true nature perhaps best captured in the Bo Burnham song “Welcome to the Internet,” from his pandemic film Inside. In character as the internet, and dressed like a deranged Willy Wonka, Burnham sings, “Can I interest you in everything all of the time? A bit of everything all of the time?” The song nods to the writings of Neil Postman, who in books like Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993), argued that a screen-based society will become, irresistibly, a carnivalesque society of entertainment and spectacle, with lasting consequences for culture, politics, religion and every aspect of life. “A great … shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense,” he writes. “…Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now—generally coherent, serious and rational.” The advent of television, however, which replaced the culture of the written word with the culture of the image, has rendered discourse “shriveled and absurd.”

Although Postman was writing before the advent of the digital age, the slow death of the knowledge-based internet over the past ten or fifteen years—the gamification of social media, the rise of short-form video platforms, well-funded attempts to destroy sites like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive— may be the ultimate vindication of his ideas. It is hard to sustain a literate culture when everyone has infinite amusement devices in their back pockets. “It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress,” said the novelist Neal Stephenson, “what they do is watch videos on TikTok.”[5]

But there is a hunger for books, and the hunger is growing. Bookish subcultures, devoted to the reading of the classics, are springing up in unexpected places. Some of the most popular and widely shared threads I’ve ever posted on Twitter have been lists of book recommendations—fun classics, weird classics, books that can be read in a single sitting—for those who want to get back into reading, who know they need to get back into reading, but don’t know where to begin.

Fearing for my own attention span, in January 2020 I began keeping a written record of every book I read, and in the intervening years I’ve read over a hundred books each year. In the first six months of this current year, in the midst of a reading sprint while doing research for three separate writing projects, I read 186 books. (Yes, if you’re doing the math, that’s a book each day for six months.) “There are enormous obstacles to deep reading now,” said Harold Bloom. “The tyranny of the visual is a frightening thing”—but its allure is not all-powerful. I’m not resigned to a bookless dystopian future, and nor should you be. If I could curb my screen habits and become a voracious reader, I believe you can as well. There are practical steps you can take, beginning today, to rekindle your love of reading and enjoy the manifold rewards of a bookish life.

1. Carry a book with you wherever you go.

I sometimes think we underestimate how much of our lives we spend waiting in queues. The insidious thing about time is that it leaks away in minutes, but the minutes add up. For those with a bit of intellectual ambition, however, this presents an opportunity. Perhaps you’ve meant to finish Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or the second volume of Pepys’s diary, but the books are gathering dust on your night stand. You can no longer look at them without feeling a pang of guilt and self-recrimination. I suggest bringing one or both on your next outing. You’ll be pleasantly shocked at how much reading you can get done whilst standing in line at the Rite-Aid. Over time you’ll begin to chip away at the book, like the bird in the Grimm Brothers’ story who slowly reduced a mountain to rubble.

Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp Magazine, wrote an influential essay about his strategies for reading a hundred or more pages per day. Chief among them is that he never leaves the house without a book. “Even a quick lunch—standing in line to grab a sandwich, microwaving leftovers in a break room—usually affords an opportunity for reading ten or fifteen pages,” he writes. “In my own case, I like to take a walk in the middle of the day; reading while walking or sitting outside is itself an important part of the hundred pages strategy. It could even be argued that certain books demand to be read outdoors: there is a park in Marquette, Michigan, that I am half-convinced was designed for the explicit purpose of facilitating the reading of Aurélia and Stephen MacKenna’s Plotinus.”[6] I rarely venture out without an Agatha Christie, a volume of Shakespeare, a battered copy of a print book about the world of the Anglo-Saxons purchased online. Not only does this allow more time in the day for reading—as Walther notes, one of the great lies is that we need to be seated at home with a silent house and an hour or more to spare before we can crack a book open—it has the additional benefit of enchanting routine errands. When I read, I’m no longer awaiting my ID renewal at the DMV; I’m watching (with dismay) Laurie’s ill-advised proposal to Jo, or witnessing the incredible moment when Henry IV, head of the Holy Roman Empire, knelt in the snow outside the gates of a castle, in a blizzard, for three days, as an act of submission to the pope, in what historian Tom Holland has called one of the pivotal moments of the Middle Ages.[7] Books are portals linking us with all that has come before and all that has ever been thought. To read a book at the drugstore is to transform the drugstore—and ourselves—into “something rich and strange.”

“What about e-book reading devices?” you might ask. I bring my Kindle everywhere—I simply can’t lug all twenty-four Gideon Fell mystery novels by John Dickson Carr, or both volumes of Dialect of Craven in the West Riding of the County of York, to the local park, though in college I might foolishly have made the attempt. But I like to bring along a physical book as well, if only for the sake of showing solidarity with fellow readers.[8] One of the most unsettling aspects of traveling via plane, for me, is walking through terminals and seeing the countless rows of faces lit by the glow of a screen, in a sort of zombified stupor, from the old to the heartbreakingly young. If you have any doubts that reading is in decline, simply stroll through an airport of an evening. I think all true booklovers must feel a stab at the heart, especially knowing that twenty-five or thirty years ago those chairs would have been filled with absorbed readers. Seeing people watching TikTok at full volume without headphones (which should be illegal), with the eagerness of heroin addicts, makes me fear for the future of my profession. But then, sometimes, I’ll board my flight and find that the young woman seated next to me is enthusiastically reading a fantasy novel by Robin Hobb. And suddenly, all is well.

So that’s the other reason why you should carry books in public: you might find yourself seated beside me on a train or a plane, and the sight of your book will save me from a panic attack.

02. Read before falling asleep.

A chronic vice of mine is wanting to read every thick book I see. The bulkier it is, the more I’m tempted to read it, and my ambitions often exceed my grasp. This is how I end up with ten books on my night stand—a history of the Vikings, a novel about the Plantagenets, and so on—each roughly the length of a Lincoln town car. I love the heft of a big book. It makes me feel as though I’m going on a journey. When I sit down to read, say, Henry IV: A Righteous King by Ian Mortimer (728 pages), the experience of reading is so immersive that I can be forgiven for thinking I’ve temporarily slipped back to early fifteenth-century England, where the cuckoo sings in the scrub, the clinking of pewter resounds from a nearby tavern, and no one has ever sent an email. To read is to “slip the surly bonds” of time and place for a bit, and a good long book can achieve this better than most.

But long books aren’t the only books that can induce a sense of immersion. I think the time of day affects how deeply I become immersed in a book. Walther suggests reading first thing when you get up, before checking your phone, but I do most of my reading at night after the rest of the house has gone to bed. For a while I was listening to Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring Aubrey-Maturin novels (the inspiration for the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World) on audio, and I can tell you there are few things more soothing than drifting off to sleep as an experienced reader reads to you a book about life on the open sea. I find that audiobooks in general have the power to soothe, and I wonder if the reasons lie in our communal past: for most of human history we heard stories rather than reading them. No surprise, then, that audiobooks have become, in the past decade, a multibillion-dollar industry: they have revived oral storytelling and returned us to our ancient roots around the campfire.

So I recommend reading or listening to a book before falling asleep. There’s something hypnotic about it. Ray Bradbury once gave a lecture to aspiring authors in which he encouraged them to read an essay, poem or play each night, though his advice has proven popular even among non-authors who are seeking the magic door back into reading. Said Bradbury:

“I’ll give you a program to follow every night. For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed, read one short story. That’ll take you ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry … Read the great poets, go back and read Shakespeare, read Alexander Pope, read Robert Frost. One poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next one thousand nights. From various fields: archeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time … I want you to read essays in every field. Every night, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay—at the end of a thousand nights, my God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?”[9]

One can certainly quibble with his choices here—I would swap out Robert Frost for Emily Dickinson or one of the Brontë sisters—but the general idea is a good one. Wanting to stuff your head full of things is as good an incentive for reading as any, especially in an era when too many brains have nothing in them at all.

03. Start with shorter books and build up your reading stamina

I do love thick books. But because this year I wanted to read widely in a number of fields, and because I didn’t want to spend three days on the same book, I’ve incorporated more short books into my reading diet.

Short books aren’t all I read, of course: given that English history has been my abiding focus for the past six or eight months, and history books tend to be quite long, I still manage four or five doorstoppers in a given month. But I’ve learned to intersperse these longer books with shorter reads on a delightful variety of subjects (mythical beasts of the Anglo-Saxon era, Icelandic sagas, a volume of folktales from Lower Brittany), so that if I come to a lull in one book, I’m always guaranteed an evening of fun and learning in some other. I can read a 150-page book in two or three hours, and by the end—if the book is good—I feel a warm sense of contentment, like someone who has just eaten a full meal. It’s this perpetual sense of satisfaction, more than aught else, that keeps me reading.

And this gets to the heart of why so many people struggle to sustain a love of reading post-schooling. There is a critic in our heads telling us we can only read in a certain way, or only read certain books. Maybe at some point you acquired a vague notion that only long books count as real books, and because you lack the stamina to read long books, you’ve given up reading altogether. As I said before, while I love the classics, I don’t much care what people read so long as they’re reading. Some weeks ago I had to read several Roald Dahl books in quick succession—The BFG, The Witches and Fantastic Mr. Fox—and I thoroughly enjoyed them, and I defy anyone to tell me they don’t count as books because they were written for children, or because they’re not long. If contemporary bestsellers don’t appeal to you (as they often don’t appeal to me), read old books. If adult books have lost their charm, try Alice in Wonderland or one of the Narnia books. If fiction doesn’t move you, read history. If your focus is shot from excess scrolling, if the thought of reading Anna Karenina makes you feel slightly nauseous, begin with something shorter—a book of short stories, a novella, a volume of poetry. There aren’t many rules when it comes to reading; that’s what makes it exciting.

04. Reduce your exposure to non-book entertainments.

This is the big one. No one wants to say it, but I think the chief culprit in the slow death of reading as a pastime is the sheer abundance of entertainment options available to us.

I don’t want to give the impression that reading is my sole amusement. I enjoy other things besides reading: Endeavour with my wife and in-laws (we just completed our fifth or sixth re-watch), a handful of YouTube channels (Books and Things, John Rogers’ London walks), Classic Doctor Who from the era when the show’s budget was roughly five pounds and every episode was filmed in the same Welsh quarry. On occasion I’ll watch a movie with the family, though I rarely if ever seek them out of my own volition. (Once a year I might catch an old Richard Burton film on Tubi.) But I’ve chosen to limit the amount of time I dedicate to non-book media because years ago I realized that an hour spent aimlessly browsing Netflix was an hour I could have spent reading. As the Roman statesman Seneca wrote in his essay “On the Shortness of Life,” your time is your life, and a moment wasted is a moment that can never be recovered.

We’ve built the only society in history where it’s possible never to experience a moment’s boredom. It’s an impressive achievement, in a sense. At this moment, if you so choose, you can open your phone and watch two young men with banjos performing a soulful bluegrass version of “Baby Shark”; an AI-generated video of a girl brushing the neck of a horse with an apple; ASMR of an anime girlfriend begging you, in a British accent, to stop talking about crypto; a YouTube channel with over ten million subscribers devoted exclusively to destroying random objects—Furbies, cabbages, toy motorcycles—with a hydraulic press. And this ceaseless tide of slop is having an effect. It’s not just books we’re in danger of losing: narrative media in all forms—television, film—is in decline because young adults who grew up on iPads are not accustomed to stories with beginnings, middles and ends. Philip Pullman identified story, correctly, as the thing we need most after “nourishment, shelter and companionship,” and we should be angry that slop has replaced story for millions in our culture. It is a kind of spiritual poverty.

But here’s the good news: we’re all characters in a murder mystery called “what killed reading?” and once you realize that the killer is excess entertainment, you can begin to adjust your habits accordingly. My friend Dylan O’Sullivan made an astute comment the other day: “There’s something about a soulless job that makes you crave mindless entertainment, and that’s the combination that slowly kills you,” adding, “Your whole life becomes an exercise in anesthesia.” But we’re not doomed to be forever trapped in this cycle. There’s something wonderfully satisfying, nourishing even, in choosing to read. No amount of money can buy you peace of heart and a sound mind—but you can find them for free at your local library.

05. Remember that reading is a joy, a pleasure.

“Remember hiding a book on your lap to get yourself through breakfast?” asks Lucy Mangan early in her book Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading. “Remember getting hit on the head by footballs in the playground because a game had sprung up around you while you were off in Cair Paravel? Remember taking yourself off to the furthest corner of the furthest sofa in the furthest room of the house with a stack of Enid Blytons and praying that everyone would forget about you till bedtime? … Do you still get the urge to tap the back of a wardrobe if you find yourself alone in a strange bedroom, or keep half an ear out at midnight for the sound of Hatty in the garden?”[10]

As Mangan notes, every adult lover of books had a moment in childhood when (in Melville’s glorious phrase) “the flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open” and they witnessed the extraordinary feats of which literature is capable. For me it was the scene in the first Alice book where the Cheshire Cat, perched in the bough of a tree, slowly vanishes, “beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.” The moment may be different for each of us—the first glimpse of the garden in The Secret Garden, the sight of the hundreds of candles hovering above the Great Hall in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the mournful note of a flute amid the falling snow in The Dark Is Rising—but once experienced it is never forgotten. That’s the joy we seek to recover when we open a new book: that first encounter with bookish magic at a young age is a high like no other. We talk about the many mental and emotional benefits of reading—improved cognition, increased empathy—but tend to overlook the best reason for reading anything, that books are fun. They are a pleasure to read, and have numbered among the chief sources of joy in this world.

One of the striking things about the entertainment dystopia envisioned by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 is just how joyless the inhabitants of his future world are. Montag’s wife overdoses on pills and nearly dies; Montag is arrested after reading aloud a poem (“Dover Beach”) that makes a woman cry because she suddenly realizes the emptiness of her life. “They run us so ragged by the end of the day,” laments sixteen-year-old Clarisse, “we can’t do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball.’”[11] We’re blessed with more amusements than Bradbury could have envisioned—one of the things he failed to foresee is a world in which kids and teens largely stay indoors—but we’re hardly better off. We have AI sexbots, instant image- and video-generators, all the music ever recorded, and to what end? Everyone is entertained and no one is happy.

Midway through the book, Faber, the old professor who becomes a mentor for Montag, gestures at the reason for all this despair. “We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth? But when he was held, rootless, in midair, by Hercules, he perished easily. If there isn’t something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane.”[12] Never before in history has humanity been so cut off from its roots—myth, literature, fairy-tales, birdsong, natural splendor. I’m afraid the road back to sanity begins with knowing the difference between pleasure and real joy, and these are the things that bring joy.

* * *

When Mr. Dan Pelzer of Columbus, Ohio died on July 1, 2025 at the age of ninety-two, his surviving children debated how best to honor his memory. Finally a daughter, Marci, hit upon a bright idea. Beginning in 1962 and for almost the rest of his life (until his eyesight gave up the ghost in 2023) he had kept a log book of every book he read—3,599 books, among them presidential memoirs, dense works of economics, biographies of urban planners, John Grisham thrillers and celebrated classics (David Copperfield was the final book on the list). When giving each guest at his funeral a printout of the log book proved unfeasible, Marci built a website, what-dan-read.com. At the service guests were presented a leaflet containing a QR code which they could use to access the list of all the books he had read in the course of sixty-one years.

But then a funny thing happened. Local newspapers learned of Dan’s reading habits. The list was featured in the Columbus Dispatch (the second time Dan and his books had appeared in its pages, the first being a 2006 profile). He was given a loving feature in the New York Times. The list went viral on social media. Within a month of his death, Dan, who had lived and read in genial obscurity, had become something he never would have sought or imagined in life: a folk icon.

In letters and interviews, Marci has recalled just how committed her father was to his bookish lifestyle. He read at work and on the bus. “Nobody loved the library more than Dan,” she told the Columbus Metropolitan Library, where he would take the kids every Saturday morning when they were young. “I’m sure he would be among your highest-circulation and longest-term borrowers.” She’s described the log book as her family’s “most precious inheritance.”[13]

In thinking about Dan and his legacy I keep returning to that phrase. Our most precious inheritance. For the Pelzers, their father’s most lasting gift was a life immersed in books. It’s hard to imagine any other form of media having that effect, with the possible exception of film. What does it say about our enduring fascination with books that we so venerate those who read them? “There must be something in books,” says Montag after a book-burning gone awry, “things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”[14]

Which is why I’m not convinced that literacy is finished. Reading is now countercultural; a fanatical devotion to books is the surest way to be noticed in an era when countless millions seem eager to dispense with the burden of thinking entirely. You will hear of others like Dan. And maybe someday we’ll gaze out over the wreckage of our anti-intellectual, amusement-obsessed culture and realize that the most radiant people, and the happiest, the most at peace with themselves and the world, were the book-lovers. And we’ll know: There must be something in books. And we’ll begin to dig through the rubbish heap of our civilization in search of the old stories and the old magic. It’s there, now, waiting for us. As the voice said to St. Augustine, “Take up the book and read.” The renewal of the world begins when the written word meets a heart in love with reading.

[1] Demopoulos, Alaina. “‘It’s so boring’: gen z parents don’t like reading to their kids—and educators are worried.” The Guardian. June 2, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/02/gen-z-parents-reading-kids

[2] Behr Rinke. “Amid dropping reading levels, professors find new ways to engage in a shifting classroom.” The Daily Texan. March 26, 2025. https://thedailytexan.com/2025/03/26/amid-dropping-reading-levels-professors-find-new-ways-to-engage-in-a-shifting-classroom/

[3] Sacks, Oliver. “The Machine Stops.” The New Yorker. February 11, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/11/the-machine-stops

[4] Clare Coffey. “You Have Permission to be a Smartphone Skeptic.” The Bulwark. April 26, 2023. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/you-have-permission-to-be-a-smartphone-skeptic

[5] Matteo Wong. “Neal Stephenson’s Most Stunning Prediction.” The Atlantic. February 06, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/02/chatbots-ai-neal-stephenson-diamond-age/677364/

[6] Walther, Matthew. “The One Hundred Pages Strategy.” The Lamp Magazine. December 6, 2024. https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-26/the-one-hundred-pages-strategy

[7] Holland, Tom. The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West. Doubleday, 2008.

[8] On certain occasions this has facilitated conversations with strangers: a woman at the post office asked to take a picture of my copy of Katharine Briggs’ Encyclopaedia of Fairies.

[9] Temple, Emily. “Ray Bradbury’s Greatest Writing Advice.” Lit Hub. August 22, 2018. https://lithub.com/ray-bradburys-greatest-writing-advice/

[10] Mangan, Lucy. Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading. Penguin Random House, 2018.

[11] Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. Ballantine Books, 1978.

[12] ibid.

[13] Feldman, Ella. “This man kept a meticulous list of all 3,599 books he’d read since 1962. When he died, his family published it online.” Smithsonian Magazine. July 31, 2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-man-kept-a-meticulous-list-of-all-3599-books-hed-read-since-1962-when-he-died-his-family-published-it-online-180987074/

[14] Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Dickens’s career as a parliamentary reporter was well established, and now his alter ego as a sketch writer is really taking off. Between January of 1835 and Spring of the following year, it would appear that Dickens published sixteen of his sketches—including “Making a Night of It,” “The Mistaken Milliner,” and “The Great Winglebury Duel”—in The Monthly Magazine, the Evening Chronicle, and Bell’s Life in London. Dickens had already been working for the Morning Chronicle but had been asked to write a series of similar sketches for the Evening Chronicle in addition. His future father-in-law, George Hogarth, had just been appointed co-editor.^[1]

This is also the time when Dickens publishes an unusual sketch called “The Black Veil,” which Peter Ackroyd points out as particularly important because it is “really his first proper story; it is no longer a sketch or a scene or a farcical interlude but a finished narrative” (Acrkoyd 170).

On a rather random note, and with no disrespect to any from Chelmsford, UK—it seems like a lovely place—I couldn’t help but share this rather funny and relatable passage from his letter to Thomas Beard in January of 1835 (page 54):

“If any one were to ask me what in my opinion is the dullest and most stupid spot on the face of the Earth, I should decidedly say Chelmsford. Though only 29 miles from town, there is not a single shop where they sell Sunday Papers. I can’t get an Athenaeum, a Literary Gazette—no not even a penny Magazine. And here I am on a wet Sunday looking out of a damned large bow window at the rain as it falls into the puddles opposite, wondering when it will be dinner time, and cursing my folly in having put no books into my Portmanteau. The only book I have seen here, is one which lies upon the sofa. It is entitled ‘Field Exercises and Evolutions of the Army by Sir Henry Torrens’. I have read it through so often, that I am sure I could drill a hundred Recruits from memory.”

If only the shops had sold Sunday papers, he might have had a rosier view of the place as a whole!

“My composition is peculiar”: Courting Kate, and Dickens’s approach to writing

What is most notable during this period is the large portion of the extant letters of his to Catherine (“Kate”) Hogarth, to whom Dickens was to be married the following year. Though I’ve not made a count of them, I would say that easily three-quarters of the letters from about May to December of 1835 are to Kate.

Much of their deepening love had probably progressed “off the page,” as there is a tone of love and confidence very early on in the letters of this courtship period. They became engaged in May. He calls her “my dearest love” frequently, and “my own darling” and “my life”; “Dearest Pig,” “Dearest Mouse,” “Ever Yours most truly & affecy [affectionately].” He wants to hear every detail of her life by post, when she can and when he is so particularly busy with work or illness that he is unable to see her. There is also a kind of domesticity burgeoning here. When they will meet the next day and eat together—often, with Dickens’s late hours, his breakfast is her lunch time. In this letter of June 1835, for example, we see his first request that she make breakfast for him:

Later, in November, he would write to Kate:

“If you knew how eagerly I long for your society this evening, or how much delight it would afford me to be able to turn round to you at our own fireside when my work is done, and seek in your kind looks and gentle manner the recreation and happiness which the moping solitude of chambers can never afford, you would believe me sincere in saying that necessity and necessity alone, induces me to forego the pleasure of your companionship for one evening in the week even” (95).

Still, there is a note of reproach when he refers to her former coldness, of “how unjust you used to be”—perhaps due to his constant work?—and wishes her to understand that “my pursuits and labours such as they are are not more selfish than my pleasures, and that your future advancement and happiness is the main-spring of them all” (95).

Here there are little intimations of some of the issues that would doubtless grow into big divides for them in later years: the stress of deadlines and Dickens’s overwork, and Kate’s complaints which clearly upset Dickens. (In December, he took umbrage that she said his recent letter had been “stiff and formal.”) No doubt, it couldn’t have been easy to be in a relationship with—let alone married to, with many children—a man of such untiring energy and endless commitments. He often says in his letters of 1835 how much he regrets being away from her, with the suggestion that she doesn’t believe him. He will hint several times that there is one thing wanting in her character for her to be perfect, which he says, in his letter of 18 December, is “your distrustful feelings and want of confidence” (110). They must often assure one another that they are “not coss”—presumably a pet word for cross—with one another.

And a lot of patience must have been needed as pressures were mounting for him on the work front: not only in keeping up his sketch writing and journalism, but Dickens was getting ready to publish his first volume of his Sketches by Boz. On 17 November, Dickens met George Cruikshank for the first time, in what Dickens described as “a long interview” (94). Cruikshank was to illustrate this first volume of his Sketches, which he did to memorable effect.

Dickens, from his letters, seemed to have suffered from a good deal of tiredness and occasional illness around this time. In late January, he complains to Kate of a “spasm” in his side, “far exceeding anything I ever felt,” which continued through the night and into the morning, along with a headache (119). Was it overwork, or some underlying condition?

Ackroyd sums up this period of time with his usual clarity and insight:

“All the while he [Dickens] was trying to balance the needs of his career against his duties to Catherine, who, on occasions, seems to have been disturbed by his attention to his work at the expense of herself. It was not unreasonable for her to be so: it must have looked as if this was the shape their marriage was about to take, and indeed in that she was not much mistaken. Nevertheless, in order to be closer to her he had moved to lodgings in Selwood Terrace, a row of houses just north of the Fulham Road and only a short walk from the Hogarths’ own house. He took the place in May at the time of his engagement, and remained here for six months—thus assuming the obligation of rents both here and at Furnival’s Inn. Despite minor and temporary disagreements, in fact, the course of their engagement was a relatively smooth one” (170-171).

A letter to Kate of 25 November, gives us an interesting tidbit about the kind of state he needed to be in in order to do his best writing. Essentially, he was excusing himself for not seeing her that evening, as he needed to finish the sketch on Newgate—more on this below—he’d been feeling the pressure from his publishers, and the visit (three weeks earlier, after which he had an intense interval of journalistic reporting duties in Bristol and Bath) was no longer fresh in his memory:

“My composition is peculiar; I never can write with effect—especially in the serious way—until I have got my steam up, or in other words until I have become so excited with my subject that I cannot leave off…”

“I was intensely interested in everything I saw”: Dickens’s Visit to Newgate Prison, a Reporting Trip to Bristol, and a fire in Hertfordshire

In November, Dickens visits Newgate prison in preparation for “A Visit to Newgate.”

“I was intensely interested in everything I saw.”

~Dickens to Catherine Hogarth, 5 November 1835 (88)

There Dickens saw some prisoners who were in confinement for life, in addition to, as the footnotes tell us from Dickens’s friend Nathaniel Parker Willis, “one young soldier waiting for execution”; it must have been quite an experience because it rendered Dickens speechless: “I do not think I heard [CD] speak during the two hours” (88).

Dickens traveled to Bristol in November to hear Lord John Russell speak as part of his reporting duties. Russell had been reappointed Home Secretary earlier in the year, and strongly influenced reform movements within the Whig party. Though I am having trouble finding the subject of this speech, he had, the month before, according to Wikipedia, “published plans for prison reform and appointed the first official prison inspectors.”

Although some of Lord Russell’s prison reforms came later, in 1837, I found this a very interesting passage, as he and Dickens seemed to have some similar concerns around this time. (Dickens’s interest in the prison system was by no means at an end with his visit to Newgate; in his American Notes about seven years later, he would deplore the system of solitary confinement and would use the experience to great effect in his fiction later.)

“In 1837, [Lord John Russell] steered a series of seven Acts through Parliament, which together reduced the number of offences carrying a sentence of death from thirty-seven to sixteen.^[42][43] This number was reduced further by the Substitution of Punishments of Death Act 1841. After these reforms the death penalty was rarely used in the United Kingdom for crimes other than murder. As Home Secretary Russell also introduced the public registration for births, marriages and deaths and played a large role in democratising the government of cities outside of London. Russell also introduced reforms regulating prisons and improving condition especially in the treatment of juvenile offenders. Under his instruction prisoners in Newgate Prison were transferred from metropolitan counties to the gaols in each county. Following in the steps of Sir Samuel Romilly, Russell reduced the number of capital crimes, and established reformatories for juvenile offenders.^[44]”

In a letter to Kate of 1 December, Dickens also talks of reporting on the fire that caused the death of Emily Cecil, Marchioness of Salisbury (born in 1750), destroying the west wing of her home. Though the inquest had not yet occurred and the bones were not to be found until a couple of weeks following, it was later supposed that feathers from her hat caught fire from a candle as she was at her writing desk.

“Too tempting to resist”: Volume 1 of Sketches by Boz, and a proposal from Chapman & Hall…

In February of 1836, Dickens’s first volume of Sketches by Boz was published by John Macrone. Dickens was eager for the reviews, and for copies to give out. But more is to come. In a letter to Kate of 10 February, 1836, we have our first intimation of the proposal from Chapman and Hall to begin what would become Dickens’s first serial novel, The Pickwick Papers:

“I had a Visit from the Publisher [William Hall] this morning….they have made me an offer of £14 a month to write and edit a new publication they contemplate, entirely by myself; to be published monthly and each number to contain four wood cuts. I am to make my estimate and calculation, and to give them a decisive answer on Friday morning. The work will be no joke, but the emolument is too tempting to resist” (129).

I will save the next segment on the beginnings of Pickwick for our next installment, in true serial, Dickensian fashion.

Thank you for reading, friends!

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim Edition, Volume One: 1820-1839. Edited by Madeleine House and Graham Storey, et al. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965.

Wikipedia contributors. "John Russell, 1st Earl Russell." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 29 Jul. 2025. Web. 30 Jul. 2025.

[1] In Dickens’s letter to Hogarth of 20 January 1835, he humbly inquires as to whether there might be a small increase in his salary—“of course of no great amount”—if he were to begin a series of sketches for the Evening Chronicle, and the footnotes inform us that his salary did increase at this time “from five to seven guineas a week” (55).

May 1833: The drama with Maria Beadnell and Mary Anne Leigh continues…

The next reading portion that I’m tackling of Volume One begins with Dickens’s biting letter to Mary Anne Leigh. While with the excuse of returning her “Album” which he’s not had time (or inclination, doubtless) to write in, he essentially tells her that she’d better not be spreading the rumors that he made her his confidante in the whole relationship drama with Maria Beadnell—that, while on the surface he says diplomatically that he could hardly have found a better confidante than her, it is a thinly-veiled jab: he’d have chosen a more discreet and tactful confidante if he’d intended to take one. “I would much rather mismanage my own affairs, than have them ably conducted by the officious interference of any one, because I do think that your interposition in this instance however well intentioned, has been productive of as much mischief as it has been uncalled for” and he wants to spare her “the meanness and humiliation, of acting in the petty character of an unauthorized go-between” (27).

In short, Miss Leigh: mind your own business and shut up.

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The third of September should be a day of mourning for every literature lover. On the afternoon of that day in 1860, Dickens had a great bonfire at Gads Hill—the home he had purchased several years earlier in fulfillment of a childhood wish—in order to burn his massive correspondence of twenty years. He got his children to assist; at least, those who were there. (Kate was on her honeymoon, and his complicated feelings about her marriage to Wilkie Collins’s brother did not, perhaps, assist his mood.) Baskets upon baskets of mail from the likes of Tennyson, Thackeray, Washington Irving, Wilkie Collins, and Carlyle were immolated on the Gads Hill pyre.

“Would to God,” Dickens said, “every letter I had ever written was on that pile.”

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Thankfully for us, this was not the case; Dickens was as prolific in his correspondence as he was in his journalism and his serial novels, so that we have many thousands of his letters still. The definitive print edition of his letters (though many more have been found since and are graciously shared by the wonderful Charles Dickens Letters Project) is the twelve-volume Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters, edited by Madeleine House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, Nina Burgis, and more, and published by Oxford University Press. These volumes are priceless treasures, worth it for the footnotes alone.

The year before last, I spent a very happy week vacationing in Newport, Oregon, in a house overlooking the misty bay with its shipyards and fish factories, with Volume Two for company—along with, of course, my beloved Boze, who put up with my many stories from the footnotes. At the time, Boze and I took it for granted that it would take a lifetime to collect all twelve volumes, as a single volume can be several hundred dollars, easily. (We’d snatched Volume Two from an online seller for $25—perhaps they didn’t know how precious it was?) Then, this past Spring, we found a seller on Ebay who was selling all twelve volumes for $550! So, our tax refund was put to good use.

I know that the volumes are hard to come by, and so a big read-along wouldn’t be feasible, but I would love to take you on my little journey through the twelve volumes of letters, of writing about things that seem particularly striking or illuminating about Dickens and his wonderful fictional worlds and trying to see where they help us better appreciate or understand his life and works. I am no formal Dickens expert, but I have loved and devoured his works since I was a teenager, and together Boze and I hosted the nearly three-year Dickens Chronological Reading Club from 2022-24 (the #DickensClub on twitter/X), going chronologically through all his major works from his London sketches (Sketches by Boz) and his other essay collections (American Notes, Pictures from Italy, The Uncommercial Traveler) to his fifteen novels and five Christmas books. While I don’t have all of the three years’ worth of Dickensian nerdery at my fingertips because my memory isn’t nearly as good as my husband’s, still…I hope to supplement the journey with renewing my research into his life and publications somewhat in sync with his letters. One of my favorite sources, then and now, remains Peter Ackroyd’s brilliant 1990 biography of Dickens, which I highly recommend as a glorious piece of literature in its own right, and an illuminating look into the psyche of the enigmatic and complicated Charles Dickens. I hope you will join along on this eccentric journey, beginning with Volume One, 1820-1839.

Summer is “icumen in,” in the words of an old song. School will soon be letting out, if it hasn’t already. Out-of-work teachers are making travel plans, reading for pleasure and, in some cases, taking on part-time work. And their students, many of them, are anticipating three months of fun and entertainment: watching YouTube streamers, scrolling on their phones and playing video games until their brains melt.

Those of us who are of a certain age remember when summer was a time for reading. The publishers of Harry Potter and other big YA series of the 2000s strategically released books during the school holidays when kids had ample leisure in which to enjoy them. Some of my most vivid memories of summer breaks during college involve a communal culture of reading that now seems vanished: midnight release parties, taking a brisk walk down to the library in hopes of finding some Lemony Snicket books, having to place them on hold and finding that I was tenth in the queue. There was something luxurious about reading a book on the night of its release, going to bed at sunrise and sleeping till past noon.

I worry that fewer and fewer kids and teens are having that experience. Studies show that among children in the U. K., reading for pleasure has plunged precipitously in the past ten years, to the point where publishers of middle-grade books are hesitant to sign new authors: what if there’s no one to read them? The Guardian recently reported that Gen Z parents—many of whom were not exposed to books as children, even in school—have come to dread the task of reading aloud to their kids: “It’s so boring,” they say. And so the problem perpetuates itself, because parents who shun the practice of reading raise kids who find more enjoyment in Minecraft than in Mary Norton or Milne. And that, I think we can all agree, is tragic. (“Read to your kids,” my friend Faith Moore said recently. “Civilization literally depends on this.”)

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Perhaps this puts me in the unfashionable minority, but I continue to believe that books are not only our greatest technology but also our greatest entertainment. I believe it’s still possible in this era to raise a child whose first love is reading, who’s more engaged by the adventures of Captain Nemo or Katniss Everdeen than the ephemeral antics of Mr. Beast. And in that spirit, today I’m suggesting fifty books for intermediate and advanced readers (ages ten and up) that I think every kid ought to read. Some are classics, some are more recent, but all the books listed are fun and enriching. Your child will, I daresay, be very glad to have read them. (You may be very glad to have read them yourself.)

Mystery Books

The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Conan Doyle. “They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” Holmes and Watson travel to Devonshire to investigate the case of a family afflicted with a legendary curse, in the most thrilling outing of their career.

The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin. When paper mogul Samuel Westing dies, his sixteen surviving relatives learn that he’s leaving his entire 200 million-dollar fortune to the one who wins the Westing Game. There’s some great character work here and I cry, hard, at the end.

Chasing Vermeer, by Blue Balliett. Two children, Calder and Petra, are drawn into intrigue when a thief steals a Vermeer painting en route to the National Gallery, all the while leaving tantalizing clues to its current whereabouts.

The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels, by Beth Lincoln. The first in a new series of insanely clever mysteries about the Swifts, an eccentric family (with names like “Shenanigan” and “Schadenfreude”) who seek treasure, solve crimes and play giant outdoor Scrabble.

The Wells & Wong murder mystery series, by Robin Stevens. One of my favorite middle-grade series ever, centering on Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells, the first initially timid, the second bossy but brilliant, as they investigate murders at their 1930s boarding school.

The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart. Really delightful series narrating the peculiar adventures of Kate, Constance, Sticky and Reynie, who must solve a number of puzzles as they work to defeat a sinister organization. Also a very charming Disney+ series.

Fantasy Books

Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll. My favorite books as a child, and still in my top five. Carroll was an actual genius and the worlds he creates in these books (a sort of upside-down Oxford) are the most inspired fantasy landscapes in literature.

The Princess and the Goblin, by George MacDonald. A girl named Irene must battle a race of underground goblins with soft feet who threaten to abduct her and force her into marriage. The Goblins in particular were a huge influence on Tolkien.

Five Children & It / The Phoenix & the Carpet, by Edith Nesbit. A witty, inventive duology about five siblings who encounter a Psammead (who grants wishes) and a rather vain Phoenix. The believable bickering of the kids left its mark on the dialogue of Narnia and Harry Potter.

The Oz books, by L. Frank Baum. Most people are unaware that Baum wrote fourteen of these books before his death and that they became increasingly strange, as I’ve documented here.

The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis. Essential reading for all children of a certain age. My eight-year-old nephew became obsessed with these books when we read them aloud together, standing atop his bed and blowing a toy horn whenever Susan’s horn was mentioned.

The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, by John Masefield. Before Narnia, before the Pevensies, there was Kay Harker. This delirious brew of witches, talking foxes, Roman soldiers, time travel, Cockney baddies and sinister old ladies was much admired by Lewis.

The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster. Once there was a boy named Milo who was bored by everything. One day he returned home from school to find a tollbooth in his bedroom, and so began a journey through Dictionopolis, the Doldrums and the Mountains of Ignorance to rescue Rhyme and Reason, in a book that’s delighted slightly precocious children for three generations.

The Chrestomanci Series, by Diana Wynne Jones. A series of loosely collected novels all featuring Christopher Chant, a highly revered minister who polices magic. The magic depicted in these books is anarchic and riotously funny, as when a violin is transformed into a cat who still creaks like a wooden instrument.

The Owl Service and Elidor, by Alan Garner. In the first, a family staying in a Welsh cottage becomes possessed by ghosts from the past, reenacting their tragic lives. In the second, four siblings enter a world of dark magic after accidentally walking widdershins round a church.

The Dark Is Rising series, by Susan Cooper. On his eleventh birthday, Will Stanton learns that he’s “the last of the Old Ones” and a key player in a struggle between the ancient forces of Light and Dark. Evocative, brilliantly written and hugely influential.

His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman. This acclaimed trilogy begins in a parallel Oxford and follows Lyra, whose scientist uncle seeks to open a portal to another world. Pullman blends science, religion and mythology into one of the most ambitious works of recent fantasy.

Nevermoor, by Jessica Townsend. My favorite middle-grade series of the past decade, centering on a girl named Morrigan Crow who’s rescued from death by the enigmatic Jupiter North (a loving homage to the Doctor) and taken to the London-esque Nevermoor.

Animal Tales

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame. Mole, Ratty and Badger undertake jaunts along the river, their rambles intersecting with the escapades of rambunctious friend Toad, who takes a keen joy in fast cars and mischief. “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter is stunning.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians, by Dodie Smith. Best-known from the Disney adaptation, the book has a gorgeously rendered sense of place that elevates it. Followed by The Starlight Barking, one of the strangest sequels ever written.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams. The story of a warren of rabbits, warned in prophecy about the destruction of their home, who travel across England in search of a new life. For advanced readers; the tone is closer to Lord of the Rings than Wind in the Willows.

Redwall, by Brian Jacques. A series of 22 novels recounting the history of Redwall Abbey, defended by benevolent moles, mice, voles and squirrels against nefarious woodland critters. The descriptions of food are stupendous. These books were massively popular among boys at my middle school.

Fantastic Mr. Fox, by Roald Dahl. When Mr. Fox and his family are trapped underground by the farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, he must use all his cunning—and the aid of badgers, rabbits, and assorted other creatures—to keep from starving, in this vibrant and winning tale by the master.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O’Brien. When the children of Mrs. Frisby, a normal but good-natured rat, are threatened with destruction, she must seek the assistance of a colony of super-intelligent lab rodents in this bonkers classic.

Adventure Books

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne. Professor Aronnax, his faithful servant Conseil, and the earthy harpooner Ned Land find themselves aboard a marvelous submarine helmed by the enigmatic Captain Nemo, who seeks revenge on the nation that killed his family.

Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. The ur-text of boys’ adventure tales for several generations of readers. After being given a map by a dying man, young Jim Hawkins sets sail in search of treasure—but trouble looms in the form of Long John Silver, a character so memorable he would later inspire one of Agatha Christie’s best villains.

Swallows & Amazons, by Arthur Ransome. Children from two families explore a lake in the Lake District, battling burglars and enjoying corned beef and ginger beer, in a book that has no real antagonist and unfolds like a pleasant dream. One of Miyazaki’s favorite books.

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexander Dumas. After escaping from an island prison, Edmond Dantes finds a fabled treasure and seeks revenge on the friends who put him there. I can’t think of a single reader who doesn’t adore this book. Among the most beloved classics.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, by Joan Aiken. Wonderfully Dickensian tale set in a parallel Victorian London and featuring menacing wolves, slightly dodgy housekeepers, and a valiant cave-dwelling urchin who befriends bees and geese. Fans of Lemony Snicket will rejoice.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne. Axel Lidenbrock must leave his fiancée to accompany his uncle, Otto, down an Icelandic volcano into a hidden prehistoric world at the heart of the earth. I must have read this book five or six times as a child. Magnificent.

Fairytales & Myth

King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, by Sir Roger Lancelyn Green. Green succeeds in adapting the Arthur stories because he understands that they’re defined by their mystery and weirdness. Outside of Malory, this is probably my favorite Arthur anthology.

The Colored Fairy Books, by Andrew Lang. There are twelve of these and they’re spectacular. Lang includes all the classics of the Western tradition but also a surprising number of tales from Africa, Asia and indigenous America, in this wonderfully comprehensive collection.

The Thousand and One Nights (abridged for younger readers). I picked this book off a library shelf at uni and sat reading it for hours, mesmerized. It’s like a Twilight Zone for the Middle Ages, extravagant in its weirdness, generous in its pleasures, and has been a cornerstone of all subsequent fantasy.

Aru Shah and the End of Time, by Roshani Chokshi. Similar to the Percy Jackson books, but with Hindu mythology rather than Greek. After foolishly lighting a lamp on a dare at a museum, Aru Shah inadvertently releases a demon who seeks to awaken a god who could destroy time.

Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths & Legends, by Peter Berresford Ellis. Probably my favorite contemporary folklore collection, showcasing the range and weirdness of tales from Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales and the Isle of Man. For older readers.

Science-Fiction / Horror

Tom’s Midnight Garden, by Philippa Pearce. The story of a boy whose garden transports him several decades into the past, where he befriends a young woman. Philip Pullman loves this book, and Steven Moffat has called it an inspiration for his work on Doctor Who.

The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells. “When you’re sixteen years old, you’re paranoid,” said Ray Bradbury, “and H. G. Wells is a very paranoid writer. And a necessary one.” The original Martian invasion story, in which terrifying tripods destroy London, still shocks.

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Perhaps the most prophetic mid-century dystopia, an increasingly unnerving vision of a world in which screens command all attention, the police engage robotic killer dogs in ruthless pursuits and people have forgotten how to read, or think.

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. Awkward, brainy Meg Murry must travel to the ends of the universe to rescue her father, in a visionary fusion of science, mysticism and cosmic horror leavened by L’Engle’s gentle Episcopalianism.

Charlotte Sometimes, by Penelope Farmer. The gorgeously eerie story of a girl who finds she’s switched places with another girl who attended her boarding school forty years before. Soon the two find a way to communicate, in this unjustly neglected cult classic.

The Giver, by Lois Lowry. The story of a world in which no one writes or paints or makes music because making art is too difficult and evokes too many complex emotions. One boy is chosen to experience the memories that the rest of the world has given up.

A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket. A masterpiece of contemporary fantasy, Snicket’s unique blend of whimsy, Gothic horror and clever wordplay birthed a generation of darkly funny, verbally precocious readers.

Realistic Fiction

The Little House Books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. One of my favorite series in the sixth grade, these books follow young Laura and her family as they traverse the plains, battle snowstorms & starvation, and carve out a home on the frontier. The Long Winter is the best of the lot.

Catherine, Called Birdy, by Karen Cushman. “If I had to be born a lady, why not a rich lady?” laments Catherine, the daughter of a medieval noble, to her diary. Her family seeks to marry her off to a number of unsuitable suitors, but the headstrong Catherine isn’t having it.

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. Not just for girls. Alcott is second to none as a writer of characters, and in telling the story of the March sisters and Laurie, she becomes the closest thing we have to an American Dickens.

Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen. A boy named Brian is gifted a hatchet by his parents, which proves useful when the pilot of his private plane suffers a heart attack and dies, leaving Brian stranded alone in the Canadian wilderness. While I was not personally a huge fan of this book, every boy I knew in school LOVED it.

The Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson. Misleadingly packaged as fantasy, this is the achingly real story of two friends, Leslie and Jesse, who build their own escape from reality. Midway through, the book takes a blindingly sudden swerve that is devastating.

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros. A series of lyrical vignettes centering on Esperanza, a young woman coming of age in a Latina neighborhood, and her colorful neighbors, from Elenita the witch-lady to Cathy, who has “cats and cats and cats.”

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. For advanced readers. An unnamed African-American embarks on a psychedelic odyssey of mob violence, mental asylums and sleet-rimed streets, all narrated in an experimental literary style reminiscent of mid-century jazz.

Holes, by Louis Sachar. Wrongly convicted of stealing sneakers, Stanley Yelnats is sentenced to a camp in the Texas desert where he and other kids must dig holes for unexplained reasons, in a story that gets wackier and more labyrinthine with every turn of the plot.

[Spoilers follow for the first half of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store].

Ever since I read it last winter, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a particular moment in James McBride’s National Book Award-winning 2023 novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. If you haven’t read it, it’s set in the early twentieth century and is centered on a Pennsylvania store / theater managed by a Jewish man named Moshe and his wife Chona, a woman who is beloved by the neighborhood’s African-American community. Doc Roberts, a local physician who had asked Chona out in high school and been rejected, joins the KKK and commits a horrific act of violence that leaves her fatally injured.

In her final moments, the book does something a bit unusual. It gives her a vision of the future, America’s future, in which the narrow scope of the story recedes and the author delivers a furious indictment of this current moment. It’s possibly the angriest moment of the book, and the most unsettling. Unsettling because I fear that everything he says here is true.

“The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from distant lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly … toward a common destiny, all of them … into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.

Had the group of stragglers moping down the hallway seen that future, they would have all turned en masse and rushed from the hospital out into the open air and collapsed onto the lawn and sobbed like children.”

Like McBride, like Ray Bradbury before him, it’s hard not to be angry about what this country has become. The National Center for Education Statistics informs us that the percentage of children who read for pleasure has dropped from 35 percent (in 1984) to 27 percent (in 2012) to 14 percent (in 2023). Smartphones and social media would have abolished the act of reading even if ChatGPT hadn’t done it. With our tech and our amusements and our constant demand for progress, progress, progress at any cost, we have succeeded in creating a nation divorced from all literature and history, a nation of the eternal present. Having chosen not to read, we are increasingly unable to read - or to think. We are losing the ability for abstract thought and interior awareness that’s defined humanity since the invention of the printing press. We haven’t progressed; we’ve regressed.

It worries me as an author, but also as a human being. When I walk through the terminals of airports I see row after row, people of every age, gazing at their screens. Parents, babies. They have the look of addicts. When Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1952, his vision of a dystopian future was one in which every house had three or four large televisions. His nightmare seems almost charmingly quaint now. No one would have guessed, then, that we would carry our televisions with us; that every person would possess an infinite entertainment device; that companies worth billions would create machines that do your writing and thinking for you. The most unnerving thing that I keep hearing from teachers - and I hear this consistently, from nearly everyone who works in public education - is that their students are no longer motivated to learn anything. It’s not that they display a lack of interest in the subjects under discussion - it’s worse. One teacher writes, “My kids don’t think anymore. They don’t have interests. Literally, when I ask them what they’re interested in, so many of them can’t name anything for me. Even my smartest kids insist that ChatGPT is good ‘when used correctly.’ I ask them, ‘How does one use it correctly then?’ They can’t answer the question. They don’t have original thoughts. They just parrot back what they’ve heard in TikToks.”

I don’t think this is sustainable indefinitely. Aldous Huxley warned that “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think,” and perhaps this is naive but I have to believe that eventually a significant number of us will realize that our oppression is being fed to us through chatbots and TikTok. Ted Gioia thinks there is coming a backlash against technology the likes of which we haven’t seen in two hundred years, and I hope he’s correct, because if not, it’s hard to see how we’re not doomed.

“‘I rather grieve—I do rather grieve to think…that those who die about us, are so soon forgotten.’

“‘And do you think,’ said the schoolmaster, marking the glance she had thrown around, ‘that an unvisited grave, a withered tree, a faded flower or two, are tokens of forgetfulness or cold neglect? Do you think there are no deeds, far away from here, in which these dead may be best remembered? Nell, Nell, there may be people busy in the world, at this instant, in whose good actions and good thoughts these very graves—neglected as they look to us—are the chief instruments…Forgotten! oh, if the good deeds of human creatures could be traced to their source, how beautiful would even death appear; for how much charity, mercy, and purified affection, would be seen to have their growth in dusty graves!’”

~ The Old Curiosity Shop

I think of this passage so often when recalling beloved family members and friends who have passed on, or when I visit a graveyard. It still brings a tear to my eye to think of what the worldwide mourning must have been for Charles Dickens. He died one hundred and fifty-five years ago today—and five years after the eventful Staplehurst crash that Dickens was involved in, and from which, in a way, he never fully recovered.

How could such a font of imagination suddenly cease flowing? He was—and is—the consummate storyteller of the English-speaking world, and he understood the poor and gave them a voice. He was only fifty-eight, his care-worn face looking much older due to his relentless activity.

Charles Dickens died at Gad’s Hill, the home that, many years ago, his father had pointed out to the youthful Charles as something to strive for.

“’Bless you, sir,’ said the very queer small boy, ‘when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And now, I am nine, I come by myself to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, “If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it.” Though that’s impossible!’ said the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his might.”

~ The Uncommercial Traveller

Decades later, Dickens had bought it.

Charles Dickens’s life was complicated; he was far from being a saint. But he spoke for the poor, the laborer, the suffering, as was eloquently attested by what Peter Ackroyd describes as the “ragged bundles of flowers” tied up with bits of rag that were found at his grave at Westminster Abbey—the grave which, after his death, had been open for two days in order to satisfy the endless waves of mourners. Indeed, “if the good deeds of human creatures could be traced to their source,” how many of us might be far better human beings for the influence of his works? He added to the world’s brightness, its “charity, mercy, and purified affection,” and its childlike joy.

No one writes of Dickens like Peter Ackroyd, whose biography of the Inimitable is one of my ten favorite books of all time. Here, I read the beautiful prologue—please forgive errors and imperfections!—and I hope you just think of it as a friend reading at your side, just as Dickens claims to be, himself, right at our elbow in A Christmas Carol.

(NOTE: SPOILER ALERT for events in Master Humphrey’s Clock and Little Dorrit.)

Here’s to the Inimitable, Charles Dickens!