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G reat literature lives in the imaginations of its readers. The earliest editions of the work of a great author therefore usually have a special voltage: this is how the first readers encountered a work that might now be a classic, endlessly reprinted and reinterpreted, but was then unexplored, untested, unprecedented. There can be no author of whom this is truer than Dickens. Formally experimental, yet unashamedly populist, Dickens used every resource of print to win as wide a readership as possible. Important collections of Dickens are not mere assemblages of antiquarian delights, they are the still humming evidence of the novelist’s unparalleled creative energies.
Dickens came from nowhere. In accounts of his fortunes, he loved to emphasise his self-sufficiency. He owed nothing to education or patronage or useful literary friends. The pride of the self-made man was essential to Dickens. In his mid-fifties, in a speech at a dinner in his honour before he left for a reading tour of America in October 1867, he spoke of treading the path of a writing career as a young man ‘without influence, without money, without companion, introducer, or adviser’. It tells us something important about his fiction. His writing was so innovative and so daring because he had to invent its shapes and voices for himself.
It all started, suitably enough, in the low, exciting trade of journalism. While working, in his early twenties, as a reporter for the Morning Chronicle, Dickens began writing sketches for various London newspapers and periodicals, under the pen name ‘Boz’. Even the disguise has a kind of bravado about it. These pieces were eventually collected together as Sketches by Boz, ‘illustrative of every-day life, and every-day people’, as the subtitle put it. With their author’s flair for the absurd and his extraordinary eye for the oddities of urban life, they announced a precocious new talent. There are first editions of both the first and second series of his Sketches by Boz in this sale. These include one of the first series that is inscribed ‘from his sincere friend The Author’ to his close friend Thomas Beard, another young journalist on the Morning Chronicle. The inscribing of presentation copies would be one of the main ways in which Dickens signalled special affection or gratitude throughout his life.
True literary celebrity was soon his. The twenty-four-year old Dickens created a publishing sensation with his first sustained work of fiction, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, which began appearing in the same year that Sketches by Boz was published. Between April 1836 and November 1837, this episodic novel, full of inset tales - some hilarious and some frightening - appeared monthly in the illustrated green wrappers that were to become Dickens’s trademark. The key moment was the entrance in the fourth monthly number of the worldly-wise Sam Weller, fount of wittily bizarre sayings, and the loyal servant alone equipped to save the accident-prone Pickwick from every scrape. With his appearance, sales soared, so Dickens kept him at the centre of the narrative. The serialised form allowed the author, anxious monitor of sales figures, to keep his finger on the pulse of public responsiveness. Yet the novel was a critical triumph too. Dickens had defeated his friends’ warnings that publishing in serial form would lower the literary prestige of his fiction
The Lawrence Drizen Collection includes a complete run of the original monthly parts of Pickwick Papers. Eight further Dickens novels would first appear in such monthly instalments, a form of serial publication that Dickens made his own. Included in this sale are complete runs of the original monthly instalments of several later Dickens novels (Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit). Looking at these again you can sense the experience that the first reader had of these great novels. They would have seen very clearly what commercial products they were. The serial parts of such complex unfolding narratives were wrapped in advertisements. The first reader of the first monthly instalment of David Copperfield would have had to turn through some 33 pages of advertisements before he or she reached the novel’s first chapter. While it is true that many of these were advertisements for books (including the novels of Dickens’s leading rivals), a good number were not. Once past the illustrated front page, the purchaser would have encountered, on its inside, a full-page advertisement for the wares of Heal’s furniture store on the Tottenham Court Road. (The intensity of advertisements diminished slightly for later numbers.)
Writing for this serial form, Dickens never had the whole novel before him – until it was finished and beyond revision. He had to commit himself to each part with the knowledge that it could not later be adjusted. Yet we know from the number plans that he left behind him – bequeathed to his dearest friend, John Forster, who then left them to the Victoria and Albert Museum – that, from Dombey and Son, his sixth novel, onwards, they were meticulously planned and plotted. Every month the reader was left in the air, but by an author who knew from the first where that reader was being led.
The illustrated wrapper was a partly obscured announcement of the plan. Dickens gave careful instructions for the design of the wrappers of his monthly novels, especially to the illustrator who worked most often with him, Hablot Browne, or ‘Phiz’ as he was usually known. Sometimes, as with David Copperfield, the cover was designed before Browne had any advance information about the contents of the forthcoming novel. For other novels, like Bleak House, Browne was given more precise details, so that his wrapper design could exploit (and foreshadow for the reader) a knowledge of the plot. From the first, illustration was important to Dickens. All his monthly serialised narratives, and some of his others were illustrated. This sale includes five wonderful original pencil and wash drawings made by Hablot Browne for Martin Chuzzlewit.
Given Dickens’s fame in his lifetime and the large print runs of many of his novels, the rarity of some editions of his novels might seem surprising. One such is a miraculously well-preserved first edition in book form of Great Expectations, in the original publisher’s striking violet cloth, still bright after all those years. Unusually, Dickens wrote the novel, which first appeared as a serial in his weekly journal All the Year Round, with a mind to its eventual publication in three volumes. The novel is internally divided into three ‘stages’ of ‘Pip’s Expectations’. At the end of the first, Pip leaves the Kent marshes for London. At the end of the second, Magwitch returns to him, announcing that he is his true benefactor. Dickens had the circulating library trade in mind: Mudie’s, the dominant such business, specialised in ‘triple deckers’ (subscribers often borrowing one volume at a time). This first edition is so rare a survival because Mudie bought up almost all the copies, dooming them to multiple borrowing and hastened destruction.
Dickens is a collector’s delight for the sheer variety of publishing formats that he used as he restlessly experimented with ways of reaching ever more readers. As well as monthly there were weekly serials such as Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities, both published in periodicals that Dickens ‘conducted’, as he rather grandly put it. There were expensive editions for the gentleman’s library and cheap one-volume editions for story-loving clerk or shop-keeper. He believed in the mass production of his fiction, yet he also liked his books to be beautiful. The Lawrence Drizen Collection includes several early editions of A Christmas Carol, with its hand coloured plates, fine coloured binding and gilt lettering, all featured at the author’s insistence. Combining fable and ghost story, it daringly exploited popular narrative forms. Yet it was to be a thing of beauty. The costs of its design features devoured most of Dickens’s earnings, so although it was a huge best-seller, he made very little money from it.
Dickens was ever the author. He had special presentation copies of his novels elaborately and expensively bound ready to be given to particular friends. The Lawrence Drizen Collection is remarkable most of all, perhaps, for the large number of its superb inscribed presentation copies. These include the beautiful copy of Pickwick Papers in black morocco, inscribed to Dr. John Elliotson, physician and proponent of mesmerism, who became the Dickens family doctor. (It might say something for the author’s priorities that the copy was originally given to his wife, Kate, but was then repurposed.) There are presentation copies of both Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop, inscribed to the actor and theatre manager William Charles Macready, the author’s bosom friend. Dickens was addicted to the stage; as a young man he had thought seriously of becoming an actor.
He carried on with amateur dramatics, with himself as a leading actor. The sale includes a very rare first edition of The Frozen Deep, the play that he co-wrote with Wilkie Collins, initially for performance at his own London home. When the play was later staged in Manchester, with Dickens still starring, he hired some professional actors for some of the roles. They included the young Ellen Ternan, who would eventually become the smitten author’s mistress. Dickens’s love of amateur dramatics is caught by other lots in this auction. There is a signed invitation card in his hand for his own amateur production of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour. Or there is the presentation copy of A Tale of Two Cities that is inscribed to Mary Cowden Clarke, who played Mistress Quickly in Dickens’s own production of The Merry Wives of Windsor (he played Shallow).
Other signed copies reflect Dickens sometimes dizzy social life as he became London’s most prized literary celebrity. A copy of Nicholas Nickleby which was sent to the society hostess Lady Holland is not only inscribed by the author, it also still contains the autograph letter that originally accompanied the gift. Fine presentation copies of The Cricket on the Hearth and Pictures from Italy, both inscribed to Count D’Orsay, memorialise his warm friendship with this dandy and compulsive gambler, who, with his mistress, the Countess of Blessington, presided over glittering salons that included the young Dickens. Whatever the narrowed sexual morality of some of his novels, Dickens was happy enough to mix in bohemian company if charming or amusing enough. His sociability is signalled by these surviving gifts. These were the means by which he established his special circle of friends and intimates. So, for instance, there is the signed copy of Bleak House presented to his lifelong friend Charles Knight, publisher of literature aimed at the literate working classes and contributor to Dickens’s Household Words. (Though his wine merchant, Josef Valckenberg, was also important enough to receive an inscribed presentation copy of A Christmas Carol.)
He would read his new work to many of these friends. Dickens always composed for the voice. At the age of 86, in 1938, George Wooley recalled in an interview how he had worked for Dickens as a junior gardener aged thirteen.
“Opposite the house was a sort of wood the master called the Wilderness. He used to go over there to write … I used to hear what sounded like someone making a speech. I wondered what it was at first, and then I found out it was Mr. Dickens composing his writing out loud. He was working on 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' then.”
Dickens’s own public readings of selected highlights from his oeuvre were hugely successful and highly remunerative. He was indeed like a pop star. One item here consists of a piece of paper on which he wrote quotations from A Christmas Carol and Barnaby Rudge for a young admirer who had come to hear him read at the Leeds Music Hall. This sale also includes his own ‘reading copy’ of his sketch of Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit, which he used for his public readings on an American tour of 1867-68 and inscribed to his American publisher, Howard Ticknor, on the night of his final reading in New York. It is marked-up in his own hand, showing him not only cutting down the passage from the novel, but also reserving underlinings for the best lines or climactic sentences.
Next year is the 150th anniversary of the author’s death. It is absolutely characteristic that Dickens died in harness. He was working on the sixth instalment of his latest novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, when he collapsed from a stroke in January 1870, dying soon afterwards. His new book showed his powers of invention undimmed. Like Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, it is strangely divided between chapters in the past tense and chapters in the present tense. It has a new kind of darkness, which shadows the lanes and gardens of what should be the quaint English cathedral city of Cloisterham. It has drug addiction and sexual obsession at its centre. And it is teazing indeed. Dickens left it exactly half-completed and a mystery still. Has Edwin Drood been murdered? Might John Jasper’s opium addiction mislead him to believe himself a murderer? Who is Datchery, the odd new detective-like character who appears at it the novel’s premature end? The sale naturally includes both the first edition in six parts and a copy of the first book edition, final examples of Dickens’s unparalleled ability to seize and possess his readers – then, and now.
