And will read nice and slick,
If you’ll only be quick.
I don’t write on tick,
That’s my comfort, avick!
July 26, ’37
DICKENS’S RHYME TO MR. HICKS, PREFIXED TO THE
MANUSCRIPT OF THE “PICKWICK PAPERS”
At the auction sale of the library of the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts in 1923, in London, I paid £3700 for the manuscript of Dickens’s The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. He had given it, the fifth and last of his series of Christmas books, to the baroness in 1850. Ten years after Pickwick, Dickens wrote this story, and the manuscript demonstrates what I have said earlier about the painstaking and less spontaneous work of an author as he grows older. The manuscript of The Haunted Man is filled with blottings, deletions, and corrections. It is now in the choice collection of Mr. Carl H. Pforzheimer of New York.
OWEN D. YOUNG