The letters of Charles Dickens

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Опубликовано: 29.06.2022, 12:51

Автор: МБЦ

 The letters of Charles Dickens, of which more than 14,000 are known, range in date from about 1821, when Dickens was 9 years old, to 8 June 1870, the day before he died. They were written to family, friends, and the contributors to his literary periodicals, who included many of the leading writers of the day. Their letters to him were almost all burned by Dickens because of his horror at the thought of his private correspondence being laid open to public scrutiny. The reference edition of Dickens's letters is the 12-volume Pilgrim Edition, edited by Graham Storey et al. and published by Oxford University Press.

Dickens received, by his own count, 60 to 80 letters every day, and when pressure of work permitted he replied to them without delay. For most of his life he did not employ a secretary but conducted his correspondence himself. Exceptions were made for begging letters, which his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth answered, and for routine business connected with his two magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round, which was handled by his assistant editor W. H. Wills, although Dickens preferred to correspond with the contributors himself. He wrote with a goose quill rather than a steel pen, and at first used black ink (now aged to brown), switching in the late 1840s to blue ink on blue paper.

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