CHARLES DICKENS IN 1857.
From a hitherto unpublished photograph by Mason.
THE DICKENS COUNTRY
BY
FREDERIC G. KITTON
AUTHOR OF
“CHARLES DICKENS BY PEN AND PENCIL,” “DICKENS AND HIS ILLUSTRATORS,” “CHARLES DICKENS: HIS LIFE, WRITINGS, AND PERSONALITY,” “DICKENSIANA,” ETC.
WITH
FORTY-EIGHT FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
MOSTLY FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
BY T. W. TYRRELL
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1911
First published February, 1905
Reprinted September, 1911
INTRODUCTION
It seems but a week or two ago that Frederic Kitton first mentioned to me the preparation of the volume to which I have now the melancholy privilege of prefixing a few words of introduction and valediction. It was in my office in Covent Garden, where he used often to drop in of an afternoon and talk, for a spare half-hour at the end of the day, of Dickens and Dickensian interests. We were speaking of a book which had just been published, somewhat similar in scope to the volume now in the reader’s hand, and Kitton, with that thoroughly genial sympathy which always marked his references to other men’s work, praised warmly and heartily the good qualities which he had found in its composition. Then, quite quietly, and as though he were alluding to some entirely unimportant side-issue, he added: “I have a book rather on the same lines on the stocks myself, but I don’t know when it will get finished.” That was a little more than a year ago, and in the interval how much has happened! The book has, indeed, “got finished” in the pressure of that indefatigable industry which his friends knew so well, but its author was never to see it in type. Almost before it had received his finishing touches, the bright, kindly, humane spirit of Frederic Kitton was “at rest and forever.” He died on Saturday, September 10, 1904, and left the world appreciably poorer by the loss of a sincere and zealous student, a true and generous man.