Section 1. Introduction to the working notes

Dickens’s “green cover” novels

The “green covers”, as Dickens calls them, had their origin in the publication of his first novel Pickwick Papers in 1836–1837. A new venture for publishers Chapman and Hall, the monthly serial devoted to the adventures of the Pickwick Club, began as a loosely related series of episodes, which became more like a picaresque novel soon after Sam Weller joined Mr Pickwick. It turned out to be a sensational success, reaching across class divisions and transcending gender. Of the next five novels, two more were produced in a similar format Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–1844).

After a gap of two years, Dombey and Son was serialised monthly, for eighteen months, with a double instalment on the nineteenth and final month. The instalments of the novel—wrapped in the same distinctive green cover as before—appeared from October 1846, at the midpoint of author’s career. Four more “green covers” followed with an increasing interval between each one. Although Dickens was always looking to publish his fiction in other ways, the format of his “green covers” remained his favourite.7

The number of pages in each monthly number—also referred to as ‘instalment’, ‘issue’ or ‘part’—was determined by the mechanics and costs of printing. Each part consisted of two printers sheets, except for the final double number. One sheet accommodated eight leaves, which printed on both sides, resulted in sixteen pages per sheet. The fixed length therefore that Dickens worked to was thirty-two printed pages for each of the eighteen two-sheet numbers, and forty-eight printed pages for the four-sheet or double number.

Readers buying the double number might assume that it was literally a ‘double number’, implying sixty-four pages of text. However, only three printers sheets were given over to text. The final green wrapper had to accommodate all the other pages that buyers would need, if they wished to have their collection of twenty instalments bound together, to give the appearance of a conventional single-volume publication. Apart from the usual two illustrations, the extra pages included a frontispiece illustrative of the novel as a whole, and a title page with an engraved vignette of an evocative moment in the story, as well as twelve pages at least of letterpress. The latter consisted of a half title page, a printer’s page, the full title page, dedication, preface (one or more pages), contents pages (at least four), a list of plates (two pages) and an errata sheet (usually placed at the start). With perhaps some blank leaves at the front and back, the extra pages accounted for the fourth printers sheet.

Each number was accompanied by two lengthy sections of advertisements, one before the text of the instalment and one after it. These could be extended, if demand increased as circulation rose. The whole was sewn, trimmed and enclosed in its green wrapper, which on the front gave the novel’s title and the names of author and illustrator, surrounded by a cover design, which hinted at the course of the story.8 Two loose illustrations, each of a moment in the current number, printed on stiffer paper, were slipped in between the first section of advertisements and the text.9 The monthly part was sold for one shilling, except for the double number sold for two. The cost amounted to twenty shillings or one pound altogether.10

When the novel was published as a single volume, the publisher would first use up unsold surplus parts. Stripped of their green cover and advertisements, they formed—perhaps with a revised errata sheet—the so-called ‘first issue’ of the first edition. The first edition, published soon after the last instalment, on 12 April, 1848—with the page layout and pagination of the monthly issue—was sold in a cloth binding for a guinea (21/- or £1.1s).11 During the first three decades of Dickens’s career as a novelist—before the development in the 1860s of much cheaper paper, made from wood pulp as opposed to the rags used before then—the price of both the single volume and of the bound-up numbers compared favourably with the price of the conventional novel, which was generally published in three volumes, and sold for one and a half guineas (£1.11s.6d).

Apart from being cheaper to produce, serialisation had the great advantage of spreading the cost to the buyers, while enabling the printer/publisher to re-coup costs using money raised through advertising and sales during publication. Just as significant as the reduction in unit cost, the organisation and technology that underpinned book production, marketing and distribution steadily advanced over each decade from the 1830s onwards. As the market expanded along the new train lines and printing machinery improved, the scale of production grew from many thousands to tens of thousands.12

Dickens was well placed to benefit from the increase. By the mid-eighteen forties, he had secured contracts with his publishers that gave him a substantial share of profits. He was also becoming more ambitious as a novelist. When Dombey and Son was well received by the critics, and the sale of each of the early monthly numbers regularly topped 30,000, he was gratified and relieved. He felt financially secure for the first time in his life, and able to save a portion of his monthly earnings. His first investment was not in speculative railway stock, but in government consoles.13

The frontispiece of this book is a facsimile of the design on the green wrapper for Dombey and Son. The design “shadowing out [...] drift and bearing” (Life 437K:8888) implicitly conveys Dickens’s determination, from beginning to end, to constrain his exuberance for the sake of coherence. Readers may like to search the design for any false trails or omissions, and compare it with his “outline of my immediate intentions” sent to John Forster (see endnote 42). Dickens feared that the cover, with “perhaps with a little too much in it” (L5:620), gave too much away.14 (For information about abbreviations, references and cross references, see above p.7).

Brown devised the design for the wrapper some weeks before the publication of the first instalment. In modern editions, it is sometimes paired with the frontispiece, the last plate for the novel, created by Browne while Dickens was working on the double number. One of the extra items that was wrapped with the final instalment, the frontispiece p.163 can be found at end of the Afterword.

History of the working notes

Beginning with Pickwick Papers in 1836–1837, Dickens produced six novels in nine years. In words alone, it was an immense output. Halfway through the sixth, Martin Chuzzlewit, when he writes to Forster “That I feel my powers now, more than I ever did”, he concludes “it is impossible to go on working the brain to that extent for ever” (L3:590–91). He plans for a lengthy break. After an unprecedented gap of two years, Dickens with some trepidation commits to another “green cover” Dombey and Son, to be published from October 1846, an important literary as well as an uncertain commercial undertaking for him.

Anticipating the occasion with a decisive change of surroundings—and in an attempt to save money—Dickens moves with his family and servants to Switzerland and then to Paris. For the first time he lives abroad during the composition and publication of the early numbers of a novel. The move brings problems for him, but a fortunate outcome for us.15 We have an unusually detailed account of the period abroad in his letters home, especially in those to Forster. His letters are the basis of the biographical headnote that begins the commentary on each worksheet.

Very early in 1846, Dickens decides that his next novel should be more ambitious in theme and structure than any previous. To assist him in the task—in a development he had then for the most part quite deliberately avoided (see his letter to Gaylord Clark, p.135)—he determines from the outset to make regular systematic notes, compiling one worksheet in preparation for each instalment.16

To begin with, Dickens has two purposes in mind. The left-hand half of the worksheet would serve as an aid to planning the current number in the light of his later intentions. The right-hand half would record the part number and the number and the title of each chapter, with perhaps some further indication of content. As the sheets accumulate, they become a check on the relation of the part to the whole, a reminder of the story’s many “threads” and a guide to his growing pile of back numbers. Once the novel is well underway, he finds that the worksheet, with a ‘wafered’ extension, might also assist him in planning individual chapters.17

Number planning (always on the left-hand side) and chapter recording (always on the right-hand side), though they vary widely in their detail and extent, are settled from the start. However, from Ws.3 to Ws.5—the end of the first quarter of the novel—Dickens experiments with different ways of using the worksheet for chapter planning. Then, after some personal and family mishaps, from Ws.9 onwards he usually plans each chapter in the ‘chapter description’ on the right-hand half; or on other occasions, dispenses with planning and simply keeps a record in the chapter description by summarising its contents. The decision whether to plan or to summarise changes with the progress of the novel, until in the winding-up of the double number, Dickens relies on the worksheet to plan all of the last five chapters. The distinctive indications of planning that are present in the double number help to identify the chapter plans in the previous eighteen worksheets.

It was probably “his dear and trusted friend John Forster”, rather than Dickens himself, who faced with such a large collection of more than five hundred and fifty loose leaves had the notes for the novel bound together with its manuscript (see the bequest to Forster in ‘The Will of Charles Dickens’ in Life 857K:17253).18 At Forster’s death two years later, the volumes of manuscript with the rest of his extensive library were willed to his wife and through her to the National Art Library within what is now the V&A Museum. Perhaps Dickens entrusted them to Forster on the understanding that they would become available to future readers.19 Such an arrangement would be consonant with the fellow-feeling he expressed for his readership and his audiences during his lifetime.20

The notes for Dombey and Son remained squirrelled away in the Museum for eight decades, until two scholars, John Butt and Sylvère Monod, apparently working independently in post-war London, used them in their postgraduate study on Dickens at Durham University and the Sorbonne published in 1948 and 1953 respectively.21 Since then, critics of the novel have drawn on the notes, particularly if their concern was with what John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson called ‘design and execution’ the subtitle of the chapter on Dombey and Son in their pioneering study Dickens at Work.

With the resurgence of academic interest in Dickens, and in the light of environmental threat to the collection, the Museum remounted and rebound all of its Dickens manuscripts in the 1960s. Unfortunately, this venture was later found to have serious flaws in the choice of mounting paper used to protect each manuscript leaf, so a second project was begun in the 1990s and finished some ten years later. The manuscript of Dombey and Son is now freshly mounted in eight carefully crafted volumes, the first of which opens with all of his working notes for the novel.22

Understandably, access has been restricted to protect the originals from environmental damage. High resolution photographing of all of the Dickens’s manuscripts in the Forster Collection was completed in 2015, which hopefully means that these digital images will soon become available online to the public. In the meantime, readers of this book can examine facsimiles of the original worksheets for Dombey and Son, supplied by the V&A Museum, along with transcriptions, intended (among other purposes) as an aid to reading Dickens’s sometimes difficult hand. The images are in high or low resolution, depending on which version of the book is being used (see the end of the ‘Foreword’, for a description of the three versions, p.5).

Materials of the working notes

This section describes the physical materials of the working notes that are mounted with the novel’s manuscript in the V&A Museum. It compares the general qualities of the paper, ink and quill of the notes with those of the manuscript of the novel.23 The twenty-six leaves of working notes consist of:

1. a small leaf, which gives the novel’s title page as Dickens first envisages it “Some Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation”. His underlines anticipate the use of the short title. He drops the “Some” of the longer title when he enters the heading on the top right-hand side of each worksheet. This small leaf is not transcribed.
2. one foolscap leaf folded on its longer side (four pages) and one half-foolscap leaf (two pages), which together contain the “List of Chapter Headings”.24 Dickens began compiling the List when he finished No.5. From then on, he enters the chapter headings as they accumulate, usually number by number. The six pages are transcribed here for the first time, with commentary in ‘Appendix C’, where each entry is numbered in square brackets. The number(s) corresponds to the number(s) of the instalment(s) in which the chapters occur.
3. nineteen pre-cut half-foolscap leaves, four of which have an addition. One whole leaf and three torn half-leaves are attached in different positions and by different means. Three are wafered on (see Ws.4, 5 and 19&20) and one is pasted (see Ws.6). 25 These make up the nineteen worksheets that, with four attachments, are reproduced in facsimile in ‘Section 5’. [Editor’s note: the abbreviation ‘Ws’ stands for worksheet; it is always followed by the number of part that it prepares for (see above, ‘General abbreviations’, p.7). The worksheet for double number is always ‘Ws.19&20’ and its attachment ‘Ws.19&20a’].

The leaves consist of two kinds of paper: (1) a bluish paper, ribbed and watermarked from being laid on a mould of parallel wires the size of letter paper, rather small and flimsy—used for the working notes, with the exception of Ws.5a and the “List of Chapter Headings”; and (2) a paler woven paper, smoother and unwatermarked, laid on a fine wire mesh, of better quality—used for Ws.5a, the “List of Chapter Headings” and the manuscript of the novel.

The qualitative contrast between manuscript and most working notes continues in the handwriting, inks and quills. Always aware of the fixed length of each number, Dickens comes to rely on a consistently written page to estimate his progress through the number. Consequently, for page after page, the handwriting in the manuscript is often remarkably regular in size, spacing and lineation. In the worksheet, on the other hand, he varies the hand’s size, style and layout, as he groups entries together to emphasise the distinctiveness of each group.

The quality and colour of the ink is also more consistent in the manuscript. In the worksheet and “List of Chapter Headings”, changes in ink can add to the contrast between groups, whether it is a change to a black ink producing corrosion, or a more obvious change of colour. The latter occurs a little more frequently in the worksheet and List than in the manuscript, partly because entries in the worksheet and List are often made at different times, and partly because in the manuscript Dickens prefers, where possible, to use the same ink for each chapter. For an account of the only exception, see the last two paragraphs of ‘Ink colour’ pp.21–2.

As for quills, some were kept, at the start at least, specifically for writing the novel. Dickens had a set of quills without which he felt unable to begin writing the first number.26 They were presumably of the best quality goose feather, which he may have recut or mended himself as the need arose, or perhaps discarded (or demoted) as they became worn.27 The quills he used in the worksheets, by contrast, are more varied, occasionally with a poor flow, e.g. the erratic flow throughout Ws.6a p.66, or sometimes with a thickly cut nib, e.g. the titles and descriptions of chs.46 and 47 (later 48) and many entries in Ws.15 p.102, where he uses a thickly cut and free flowing quill that threatens to blot, having used a finer quill to write his initial number plan and the plan for ch.48 (later 47).

In this description of the materials that Dickens used, the application of the word ‘manuscript’ has narrowed to ‘the manuscript of the novel’. As mentioned earlier, the worksheets and the other working notes are a part of the manuscript that is held in the volumes of the V&A Museum. However, a clear distinction between the manuscript of the novel and the working notes has to be made in order to understand the relation between the two. From now on ‘manuscript’ and its abbreviation ‘MS’ always refers to the manuscript of the novel, excluding the working notes.