Footnotes:
[1] See Idyll. xv. 77. This discovery is not my own, but that of the late Dr. Donaldson, who used to translate the passage accordingly with great gusto.
[2] For operas, as a form of dramatic entertainment, Dickens seems afterwards to have entertained a strong contempt, such as, indeed, it is difficult for any man with a sense of humour wholly to avoid.
[3] W. & D. Grant Brothers had their warehouse at the lower end of Cannon Street, and their private house in Mosely Street.
[4] As there is hardly a character in the whole world of fiction and the drama without some sort of a literary predecessor, so Dickens may have derived the first notion of Grip from the raven Ralpho—likewise the property of an idiot—who frightened Roderick Random and Strap out of their wits, and into the belief that he was the personage Grip so persistently declared himself to be.
[5] After dining at a party including the son of an eminent man of letters, he notes in his Remembrancer that he found the great man’s son “decidedly lumpish,” and appends the reflexion, “Copyrights need be hereditary, for genius isn’t.”
[6] From a list of MSS. at South Kensington, kindly furnished me by Mr. R. F. Sketchley, I find that Mr. R. H. Shepherd’s Bibliography of Dickens is incomplete on this head.
[7] By an odd coincidence, not less than four out of the six theatres advertising their performances in this first number of the Daily News announce each a different adaptation of The Cricket on the Hearth. Amongst the curiosities of the casts are observable: At the Adelphi, Wright as Tilly Slowboy, and at the Haymarket Buckstone in the same character, with William Farren as Caleb Plummer. The latter part is taken at the Princess’s by Compton, Mrs. Stirling playing Dot. At the Lyceum, Mr., Mrs., and Miss Mary Keeley, and Mr. Emery, appear in the piece.
[8] It is, perhaps, worth pointing out, though it is not surprising, that Dickens had a strong sense of what I may call the poetry of the railway-train. Of the effect of the weird Signalman’s Story in one of his Christmas numbers it is not very easy to rid one’s self. There are excellent descriptions of the rapidity of a railway journey in the first chapter of The Lazy Tour, and in another Household Words paper, called A Flight.
[9] Among these is Mr. Alexander Ireland, the author of the Bibliography of Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt, who has kindly communicated to me part of his collections concerning the former. The tittle-tattle against Leigh Hunt repeated by Lord Macaulay is, on the face of it, unworthy of notice.