The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens
These 450 letters, drawn from a total of 14,000, are well chosen and annotated, but the print is very small. Dickens is not one of the great confessional correspondents. In his energetic, often hasty responses to ideas and people, projects and places, debts and death, his tone varies from chummy to fawning. He describes the genesis of his novels, creation of characters, choice of titles; his editing of periodicals and performing in amateur theatricals. He attends a public hanging: “I stand astounded and appalled by the wickedness it exhibits.” He writes that “invention seems the easiest thing in the world. But the difficulty of going at what I call a rapid pace is prodigious.” He exclaims that he’s breaking his heart over the death of Little Nell “and cannot bear to finish it.” A near-fatal railway accident throws him into shock: “I was in the carriage that did not go over the bridge, but which caught on one side and hung suspended over the ruined parapet.” Essential for those interested in Dickens but not riveting for the casual reader. --Jeffrey Meyers