I am under special obligations to Mr. R. F. Sketchley, Librarian of the Dyce and Forster Libraries at South Kensington, for his courtesy in affording me much useful aid and information. With the kind permission of Mrs. Forster, Mr. Sketchley enabled me to supplement the records of Dickens’s life, in the period 1838-’41, from a hitherto unpublished source—a series of brief entries by him in four volumes of The Law and Commercial Daily Remembrancer for those years. These volumes formed no part of the Forster bequest, but were added to it, under certain conditions, by Mrs. Forster. The entries are mostly very brief; and sometimes there are months without an entry. Many days succeed one another with no other note than “Work.”
Mr. R. H. Shepherd’s Bibliography of Dickens has been of considerable service to me. May I take this opportunity of commending to my readers, as a charming reminiscence of the connexion between Charles Dickens and Rochester, Mr. Robert Langton’s sketches illustrating a paper recently printed under that title?
Last, not least, as the Germans say, I wish to thank my friend Professor T. N. Toller for the friendly counsel which has not been wanting to me on this, any more than on former occasions.
A. W. W.
CONTENTS.
| PAGE | |
| Preface | [v] |
| [CHAPTER I.] | |
| Before “Pickwick” | [1] |
| [CHAPTER II.] | |
| From Success to Success | [20] |
| [CHAPTER III.] | |
| Strange Lands | [49] |
| [CHAPTER IV.] | |
| “David Copperfield” | [85] |
| [CHAPTER V.] | |
| Changes | [108] |
| [CHAPTER VI.] | |
| Last Years | [146] |
| [CHAPTER VII.] | |
| The Future of Dickens’s Fame | [192] |