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| Charles Dickens, who burned thousands of his letters. Photograph: AP |
My Dear Madam,
I am very much obliged to you for your beautiful lines on the death of Nell, which I have read with great interest and pleasure.
Believe me
Faithfully Yours
CHARLES DICKENS.
The footnote gives us the context:
Rebecca Nichols (1819-1903), poet and newspaper editor, then living in Cincinnati. Her poem, commemorating Nell in spring, summer and autumn, began: “Spring, with breezes cool and airy, / Opened on a little fairy.”
In those few lines we can see what a good editor Professor Jenny Hartley is. First, she has included Dickens’s letter, which does not, on the face of it, look interesting at all, except perhaps as an indication of his politeness to his public. Second, she has looked up the poem that occasioned the reply. This isn’t hard to do, thanks to the digitising efforts of the Library of Congress, but she could still have thought her time better spent elsewhere. And third: she quotes all she has to of the poem, without comment. (It goes on in the same vein, but those opening lines are, you will agree, special; the guffaw that exploded from me as I read them made me think of Oscar Wilde’s famous remark that one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.) Then you imagine Dickens himself reading this rubbish and realising he was going to have to say something nice about it; and then, perhaps, rolling his eyes before putting pen to paper. While we’re at it, we can pause to reflect on Nichols’s world, and her delight in receiving a note from the great man, unless a corner of her mind registered the faint possibility of sarcasm (“believe me”).
Extracting this much from six lines isn’t bad going, and when you think that Hartley had to plough through the 12 huge volumes of Dickens’s surviving letters to make her selection (he burned thousands more, but in an age when Londoners could expect a reply from a letter within two hours, inevitably many escaped the bonfire), your admiration for her grows deeper and deeper.
The letter I quoted is not, of course, representative. There are others that are less ambiguous or formal. It’s hard to say which are my favourites: they are all, in their way, good. Dickens was not known for his restraint in his exploration of the rhetorical potential of the English language, and reading this book is like listening to the work of an already uninhibited court maestro who has been let further off the leash.
The reason Dickens tended to burn his letters was, he said, because they captured him at unguarded moments – and they are all the better for it. We get an anonymously written letter about the exploitation of women and children by mine-owners prior to the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, for publication in the Morning Chronicle, which has lines you could quote today that would shame our government with their articulate fury. There’s a letter in which he describes being visited in a dream by the “Spirit” of his dead daughter, Mary, and asking her which is the true religion, or whether they are all true (the right religion for Dickens, he is told, is Catholicism, which made me raise an eyebrow). Another describes him taking round water in his hat and brandy from his flask to the injured and dying victims of the 1865 Staplehurst train crash, which he was in with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother. There are musings about works that have been sidelined (such as Master Humphrey’s Clock, a weekly periodical written entirely by Dickens for a year and a half), and also about whether to murder Chapman and Hall, his publishers. In short, the whole book bursts with the author’s energy, and you will love him and know him better after reading even a few of these letters. If you don’t buy it now, or put it on your Christmas list, it can only be because you already have a copy.
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