A Journey Through Twelve Volumes of Dickens's Letters

The beginning of a new series

Dickens at his writing desk. enwiki, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.”

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.

Our cat, Poirot, admiring the new-to-us twelve volumes

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.

With Boze and Dickens’s letters, in Newport, Oregon, December 2023

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.