Endnotes

Rotation of text to any angle within a text box was the crucial development in Word 2010 at the time.
Double quotation marks are used for Dickens’s own words and singles for all others.
This quote is from the fifth paragraph of the Preface to The Tragic Muse by Henry James (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20085/20085-h/20085-h.htm#PREFACE). He is not thinking specifically of Dombey and Son but of the nineteenth-century realist novel in general.
Turner’s article is in A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Francis O’Gorman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp.113–33 (p.119).
Quoted from Paul Schlicke’s article ‘Dombey and Son’ in The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.183–86.
‘Manuscript’ (with the abbreviation ‘MS’) in this study refers to the manuscript of the novel. To avoid ambiguity, it excludes the working notes, i.e. the monthly worksheets and other notes, although these have become bound into Volume 1 of the manuscript of the novel.
The origin of what became a monthly standard is documented in chapter three of Dickens and His Publishers by Robert Patten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978; reprinted by The Dickens Project, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1991), pp.45–74.
The cover design of the green wrapper is reproduced to scale and in colour at the front of this book. It is used as the frontispiece, in black and white, in both the Clarendon hardback and the Oxford World’s Classics paperback (where it is also much reduced).
Readers would most likely look at the two illustrations, question their significance, and have each one in mind as they began reading, whereas the reader of the volume publication came across the illustrations as they read the text, the printer having inserted each plate near to the page carrying the relevant narrative.
In the old currency of pounds, shillings and pence (or £sd), 12d (pence) = 1/- (shilling) and 20/- = £1. John Dickens’s income from the Naval Pay Office began at a little under £200 p.a. when he married in 1809, rose to over £400 in the 1820s, and then fell back (Slater, p.8 and p.12). With the income and status of a member of the aspiring middle class, he owned a standard set of literary volumes of the previous century, which his eldest son—‘a terrible boy to read’—devoured (Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Sinclair–Stevenson Ltd., 1990) p.44). However, in a more frugal lower-middle-class home, buying a novel would probably be a rare event, though its members might pay a shilling for a monthly instalment. When the father was imprisoned for debt in 1824, his son was earning 7/6 per week as a child worker. Later Dickens began earning as an office boy in 1828 at a starting wage of 10/6 per week. Scrooge’s pay to his only clerk Bob Cratchit at 15/- a week for a man with six children was a starvation wage. For information on ‘money values’ and ‘readership’, see Shlicke, pp.381–83 and pp.487–89; for economic data, see measuringworth.com.
Unlike the individual parts, many of these ‘first issue’ first editions, bound up by owner or publisher from the parts, are at the time of writing (2015) in general circulation and occasionally offered for sale.
The place of the mode of production in cultural history is outlined in the introduction to The Making of Victorian Novelists by Bradley Deane (London: Routledge, 2003), pp.ix-xvi, and in the article by Mark Turner, ‘“Telling of My Weekly Doings”: The Material Culture of the Victorian Novel’, in: A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Francis O’Gorman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp.113–33. An account of some of the issues is also given in chapter two of Charles Dickens: A Literary Life by Grahame Smith (London: Macmillan Press, 1996).
For an overview of the novel, see Schlicke’s article, ‘Dombey and Son’. For a longer account of Dickens’s life at the time of the novel’s composition, see chapter eleven in Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing by Michael Slater (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). Leon Litvack gives a brief summary of Robert Patten’s account (see endnote 7) of the effect of novel’s success on Dickens’s financial arrangements in his annotated bibliography Charles Dickens’s 'Dombey and Son': An Annotated Bibliography (New York: AMS Press, 1999), entry no.21, pp.19–20.
Butt and Tillotson describe the narrative content of the design in detail in Dickens at Work, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Methuen, 1968), pp.92–94.
His difficulties, as he saw them, are recounted in a letter to Forster in August 1846:
“You can hardly imagine […] what infinite pains I take, or what extraordinary difficulty I find in getting on FAST. Invention, thank God, seems the easiest thing in the world; and I seem to have such a preposterous sense of the ridiculous, after this long rest” (it was now over two years since the close of Chuzzlewit), “as to be constantly requiring to restrain myself from launching into extravagances in the height of my enjoyment. But the difficulty of going at what I call a rapid pace, is prodigious; it is almost an impossibility. I suppose this is partly the effect of two years’ ease, and partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. I can’t express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is IMMENSE!! I don’t say this at all in low spirits, for we are perfectly comfortable here, and I like the place very much indeed, and the people are even more friendly and fond of me than they were in Genoa. I only mention it as a curious fact, which I have never had an opportunity of finding out before. My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them (Life 423K:8591; for the reference conventions, see overleaf, endnote 18).
The term ‘worksheet’ (abbreviated to ‘Ws’) is used for the number plan and chapter plan together, in order to avoid the confusion that often arises from using ‘number plan’ for the worksheet as a whole and for those parts of the left-hand page that are plans for the number. The difference is variously made by other writers using a finer distinction, e.g. ‘Number/number’, ‘number-plan/number plan’, which seems less memorable and more difficult to sustain.
A wafer was a small disk of paste which became moist when you wetted it. Dickens uses the disks in the working notes to join leaves together. Quick-drying, the disks and leaves appear without exception to have stayed exactly where Dickens placed them.
References are to two versions of John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens: the first, edited by J. W. T. Ley (London: Cecil Palmer, 1926), by page number, and the second, ebook 25851 in Project Gutenberg, downloaded to Kindle, by ‘location’ number. The editor’s reasons for using Kindle, rather than direct reference to ebook 25851, are given in ‘References’, p.7.
Dickens himself valued his working notes sufficiently to want them preserved along with the manuscripts of his novels. The manuscript of Dombey and Son is just one of many complete manuscripts of Dickens’s novels in the V&A’s Forster Collection, all of which have working notes of some sort.
After writing this section, the editor discovered Valerie Purton’s work on ‘sentimentalism’. She suggests that the warm friendliness of Dickens’s mature prose style develops from his experience of the drama and fiction of sentiment from Henry Fielding to Charles Lamb, a legacy that is prominent in Dombey and Son, ‘his greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition’. See Valerie Purton, Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition (London: Anthem Press, 2012), pp.123–39.
John Butt in his article ‘Dickens at Work’, Durham University Journal (June 1948) cited in R. C. Churchill, A Bibliography of Dickensian Criticism (London Macmillan Press, 1975), p.29 and Sylvère Monod in Dickens, romancier. Étude sur la création littéraire dans les romans de Charles Dickens (Paris, 1953) translated by the author as Dickens the Novelist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968). They may have been encouraged by the publication of Eric Bolls’ article, ‘The Plotting of Our Mutual Friend’, in Modern Philology 42 (1944) cited in Churchill p.115, on the working notes for Our Mutual Friend that are held in the New York Public Library.
For more on the details of the conservation of the manuscript, see Annette Low, ‘The Conservation of Charles Dickens’ Manuscripts’, V&A Conservation Journal, no.9 (October 1993), http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/conservation-journal/issue-09. The position of the worksheets in the manuscript of the novels varies. In Little Dorrit, for example, each worksheet is placed at the start of the relevant instalment.
There are some minor differences between the description of the notes here and that of the Clarendon edition of Dombey and Son (Horsman 1974, ‘Introduction’, pp.xliii-xlvi), and a few disparities, e.g. the description of the left-hand page of Ws.5 and the description of the “List of Chapter Headings”. The treatment of transcription is of course quite different.
Horsman seems to confuse leaves and pages in his description of the “List of Chapter Headings” (Horsman, p.xliii). There are six pages in all. Dickens uses both sides of three leaves (one is still joined to another to form the only uncut foolscap sheet in the entire manuscript of working notes and text).
The three wafered additions were probably attached to their worksheets by Dickens himself some time during his work on the relevant number, whereas the leaves on “Florence’s age” (Ws.6a) were always separate pages, until pasted on to the back of Ws.6 after his death, when all the working notes were bound up with the manuscript of the novel. For an account of ‘wafering’, see above endnote 17.
Dickens was waiting in June 1846 for the delivery of “the big box” containing his writing materials (L.4:373).
Cutting and mending a pen was clearly a skill that every clerk or teacher would be expected to have, and one that every properly-schooled early-nineteenth-century boy would be expected to learn. An office boy working for Household Words later recalls that he was not allowed to cut Dickens’s quills, implying that Dickens took special care over it and/or was used to doing the job himself (see Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1991), 2:196. The process of cutting a quill to a thin, medium or broad tip and splitting the end to help the flow required skill and practice (which accounts for the search for an acceptable steel substitute between 1830 and 1860). The ‘pen-knife’ evidently had a sharper blade than the ordinary present-day pen-knife; it could be honed to a razor-sharp edge. Dickens may have more often avoided the delay of re-cutting by simply taking up a fresh pen; he writes in a letter of 1842, “As my pen is getting past its work I have taken a new one” (L.3:160). Perhaps not regularly re-cutting his own quills, he did not keep a pen-knife handy, like Mr Merdle who, needing a sharp blade to bleed himself to death, has to borrow a pen-knife from his daughter-in-law (Little Dorrit, eds. Stephen Wall and Helen Small (London: Penguin classic, 2003) pp.680–83.
Where the space is limited, reference to left-hand and right-hand half of the worksheet is sometimes abbreviated to ‘LH’ and ‘RH’ respectively.
Readers of the digital version of this book, who interrupt the text to follow hyperlinks, may be able to return to the text either by ‘alt + left arrow’ or by a ‘Go back’ facility, depending on their software and/or system. Similarly, the command to rotate (between portrait and landscape mode) varies with different software (in Adobe, it is ‘ctrl’ + ‘shift’ ‘+’ or ‘-’).
One of the few mistakes in underlining chapter titles is in ch.62, where Dickens, underlining the first revision of the title in the worksheet, gives a pair of underlines to the first syllable of “Final” (a ‘run-on’ error); see Ws.19&2042 p.123 and cf. ‘Appendix C’, entry [15b], p.178 (a ‘transfer’ error).
Word 2010 allows the use of drawn straight lines (‘shapes’) to distinguish various degrees of thickness, four of which are used in transcription (a half, three-quarter, one and one-and-a quarter points). The program provides as many degrees (‘gradients’) of blackness as there are percentage points.
All transcribers comment on individual instances of corrosion and sometimes use it to detect concurrent entries, but none give a wider account of it, perhaps because of its unreliability. The perception of corrosion is affected by the quality of the light source and by the colour of the surroundings. It is also possible that environmental pollution has created some corrosion since Butt began his work in the 1940s.
The diagonal slash first appears in the earliest surviving pages of notes: for No.41 of The Old Curiosity Shop, then in the two pages of notes for Nos.4 and 6 of Martin Chuzzlewit (a general precursor of the format of the working notes); see Stone, pp.8–9 and pp.42–45.
In this respect, Dickens seems to take more care in the manuscript (his copy text) than in the notes. It is likely that he used blotting paper of some sort to accelerate drying; some of the random marks resemble the transfer typical of the blotting paper of a hundred years later. Cf. the many references to blotting and blotting paper in Household Words and All the Year Round at http://www.djo.org.uk/household-words.html.
Among the errors is Paul Herring’s misreading of ‘awful’ for ‘artful’ ; see ‘Number Plans for Dombey and Son’, Modern Philology 64 (1966), 151–87, p.171.
Many of the critical comments on Stone’s transcriptions also apply to those of Trey Philpotts’s transcriptions in his “Companion to Dombey and Son” (Great Britain: Liverpool University Press, 2014). His transcriptions are reduced photographic copies of Stone’s, but with the two halves of each worksheet placed on opposite pages and without the facsimiles that were intended to accompany them.
At the age of seventeen, Dickens learnt the Gurney system of shorthand, after only a six-month struggle—it usually took two years. He went on to become an outstanding practitioner by all accounts, including his own tongue-in-cheek boast to Wilkie Collins many years later: “I dare say I am at this present writing [6 June 1856], the Best Hand Writer in the World” (L.8:130). He still had the facility when he tried to teach it, forty years on, to one of his sons, Henry Fielding (about nineteen at the time), who gives a memorable account of his lessons. His father’s sample speeches were the source of so much laughter for both of them that Henry made little progress (Collins (1991) 1:164).
Herring, Paul D., ‘Number Plans for Dombey and Son’, Modern Philology 64 (1966), 151–87.
Overlooking how entries are grouped is relatively common. Even Sylvère Monod, usually a careful commentator on the notes, seems to misread significant groupings in Ws.2 (Monod, 1968, p.259).
This apt phrase ‘the marriage storm’ is adapted from Butt and Tillotson, where they describe the ‘real storm-centre of the novel’ (see Dickens at Work, p.103).
As each original manuscript leaf is mounted on a white sheet, any entries on the verso side are revealed by cutting a window in the mounting sheet. A photograph of the window and what it reveals can then be taken without removing the manuscript leaf from its mount. The only verso entry in the worksheets (apart from that of the exceptional Ws.6a) is Ws.1 verso, which because of its smaller size is displayed in portrait mode.
Dickens’s outline to Forster is as follows [the paragraphing is the editor’s]:
I will now go on to give you an outline of my immediate intentions in reference to Dombey. I design to show Mr. D. with that one idea of the Son taking firmer and firmer possession of him, and swelling and bloating his pride to a prodigious extent. As the boy begins to grow up, I shall show him quite impatient for his getting on, and urging his masters to set him great tasks, and the like. But the natural affection of the boy will turn towards the despised sister; and I purpose showing her learning all sorts of things, of her own application and determination, to assist him in his lessons; and helping him always. When the boy is about ten years old (in the fourth number), he will be taken ill, and will die; and when he is ill, and when he is dying, I mean to make him turn always for refuge to the sister still, and keep the stern affection of the father at a distance. So Mr. Dombey—for all his greatness, and for all his devotion to the child—will find himself at arms’ length from him even then; and will see that his love and confidence are all bestowed upon his sister, whom Mr. Dombey has used—and so has the boy himself too, for that matter—as a mere convenience and handle to him. The death of the boy is a deathblow, of course, to all the father’s schemes and cherished hopes; and ‘Dombey and Son,’ as Miss Tox will say at the end of the number, ‘is a Daughter after all.’….
From that time, I purpose changing his feeling of indifference and uneasiness towards his daughter into a positive hatred. For he will always remember how the boy had his arm round her neck when he was dying, and whispered to her, and would take things only from her hand, and never thought of him. … At the same time I shall change her feeling towards him for one of a greater desire to love him, and to be loved by him; engendered in her compassion for his loss, and her love for the dead boy whom, in his way, he loved so well too.
So I mean to carry the story on, through all the branches and offshoots and meanderings that come up; and through the decay and downfall of the house, and the bankruptcy of Dombey, and all the rest of it; when his only staff and treasure, and his unknown Good Genius always, will be this rejected daughter, who will come out better than any son at last, and whose love for him, when discovered and understood, will be his bitterest reproach. For the struggle with himself which goes on in all such obstinate natures, will have ended then; and the sense of his injustice, which you may be sure has never quitted him, will have at last a gentler office than that of only making him more harshly unjust….
I rely very much on Susan Nipper grown up, and acting partly as Florence’s maid, and partly as a kind of companion to her, for a strong character throughout the book. I also rely on the Toodles, and on Polly, who, like everybody else, will be found by Mr. Dombey to have gone over to his daughter and become attached to her. This is what cooks call ‘the stock of the soup.’ All kinds of things will be added to it, of course (Life 472–73K:9244–65; for the full reference, see endnote 18).
On the back of Ws.1, Dickens enters the number heading for a fourth chapter (ch.22) in the same hand as the other three number headings, showing that they were very probably entered altogether. For the later transfer of number heading and title to the front of the worksheet, see the last entries in the commentary on Ws.1 (recto), p.41.
Like the number heading for ch.4 (see above), its title is entered on the under (verso) side of Ws.1, sometime after the entry of the number heading.
This chapter’s function as a short, alternative ch.4 accounts for its unusual brevity; it is only four printed pages and, with ch.16, one of the shortest (see chs.7, 16 and 62 in ‘Appendix A’). It became ch.7.
Georgina recorded that an average day’s work for him was two to two-and-half sides of manuscript, and a very, very hard day’s work was four of them (Collins, 1991, 1:119). However, Dickens’s written output cannot be used as a measure of creativity. Charley, his eldest son, records that his father used to say that it was his business to sit at his desk during just those particular hours of the day [ten o’clock to lunchtime]: ‘I have known a day to have been barren of copy, but to have been a very good day, notwithstanding. […] I learnt to know well, that he had been, almost unconsciously, diligently thinking all round his subject’ (ibid., 1:120).
Readers without access to the critical Clarendon text, or who in any case wish to read the longer cuts in their context, may prefer to download ebook 821, the free edition of the novel in Project Gutenberg, where most—but not all—of the longer cuts have been silently restored (see http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/821).
Forster considered that, of all the letters he received from Dickens, the following passage written towards the end of August 1846 threw more ‘illuminative light’ onto his life as a writer than any other:
But the difficulty of going at what I call a rapid pace, is prodigious; it is almost an impossibility. I suppose this is partly the effect of two years’ ease, and partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. I can’t express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is immense!! I don’t say this at all in low spirits, for we are perfectly comfortable here, and I like the place very much indeed, and the people are even more friendly and fond of me than they were in Genoa. I only mention it as a curious fact, which I have never had an opportunity of finding out before. My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them (Life 423K:8595; for the full reference, see endnote 18).
In the paragraph beginning “After another cold interval” at the word “font”, Forster cuts “a rigid marble basin which seemed to have been playing a churchyard game at cup-and-ball with its matter-of-fact-pedestal, and to have been just that moment caught on top of it” (Horsman 1974 p.59 n.2; in ebook 821, K:1103, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/821 downloaded to Kindle). For the use of ebook 821, see ‘References’ p.7.
A second proof of ch.7 has the following added to the ending (deleted by Forster and adapted by Dickens to form the first paragraph of the opening of No.3):
Beneath the watching and attentive eyes of Time—so far another Major—his slumbers slowly changed. More and more light broke in upon them; distincter and distincter dreams disturbed them; an accumulating crowd of objects and impressions swarmed about his rest; until he woke—a Schoolboy!
One number followed by another superscripted (and both bracketed together) is a combined page reference to the Clarendon text in hardback and paperback (see ‘References’, p.7).
Dickens may have coalesced his memories of Mrs Roylance and memories of another landlady (see Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (London: J. M. Dent & Son, 1983), p.389 n.41).
Dickens was aware of the difficulty that his visual imagination and retentive memory posed for his illustrators. In connection with John Leech’s illustration for the Christmas book for 1846, The Battle of Life, he writes ruefully “You know how I build up temples in my mind that are not made with hands (or expressed with pen and ink, I am afraid), and how liable I am to be disappointed in these things” (Life 440K:8945).
The third paragraph of Dickens’s second preface to Pickwick Papers, written in September 1847, begins:
It was observed in the Preface to the original Edition, that they [the parts] were designed for the introduction of diverting characters and incidents; that no ingenuity of plot was attempted, or even at that time considered very feasible by the author in connexion with the desultory mode of publication adopted […] on one of these points, experience and study have since taught me something, and I could perhaps wish now that these chapters were strung together on a stronger thread of general interest. (Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology, ed. Stephen Wall (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), pp.80–84), p.81.
The worksheets for Dombey show Dickens striving for a “stronger thread of general interest” with considerable “ingenuity of plot” and much else besides that contribute to the unity of the novel.
One of the reasons Dickens preferred monthly over weekly publication was that the former gave him more “elbow room” and “open places in perspective” in comparison with the compressed “teaspoonful” instalments of the latter (see below, endnote 103).
At issue here is whether the descriptions are plans made before composition or summary records made after it. Butt and Tillotson’s pioneering Dickens at Work seems to have had an unfortunate effect in this respect. When they give close attention to the evidence (particularly of colour) supporting the view that a few notes are written after composition, they give the impression that many, or even most, descriptions are retrospective summaries. Generalisations along these lines find their way into Paul’s Herring’s article and into many introductory accounts of the working notes.
In Dickens’s letter to Forster on 5 July 1846 he mentions “a great surprise for people at the end of the fourth number, [the death of Paul, later moved to the fifth number] and I think there is a new and peculiar sort of interest, involving the necessity of a little bit of delicate treatment whereof I will expound my idea to you by and by” (Life 404K:8229; for full reference, see endnote 18).
See Dombey and Son, ed. Alan Horsman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)—hereafter ‘Horsman 1974’ and followed, for example, by ‘Introduction’, p.xxix n.1; see ‘References (2)’, p.7.
Horsman 1974, ‘Appendix D’, pp.865 and xlviii.
The unpublished passages in the manuscript of No.5 are only available in the hardback critical Clarendon edition. Containing some characteristic examples of Dickens’s inventive exuberance and his “preposterous sense of the ridiculous”, comic matter is often the first to be sacrificed when he is correcting an over-run (see Horsman 1974, p.183 n.1 and p.185 n.2, both from ch.14, extensions of Paul’s conversation with Toots and Miss Blimber respectively, and p.207 n.1, p.214 n.1 and p.217 n.4, all three cut from ch.15). No cuts were made to ch.16. Unfortunately, none of the cuts are restored in Project Gutenberg’s ebook 821.
The final “too” is not in the published text. The editor supplies it from Horsman’s account of the reading versions in ‘Appendix D’ of the hardback Clarendon edition (pp.862–65). According to Horsman, when Dickens began public readings for his own benefit in 1858, the story of “Little Dombey” was the first to be taken from a full-length novel. The version with the “too” added to the last word of the reading is in the Berg copy held by the New York Public Library (Horsman 1974, ‘Appendix D’, p.865). The detail is not mentioned in Philip Collins’s edition of Charles Dickens: The Public Readings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). The added word helps convey the authenticity of the aging Dickens’s management of pathos.
The quotations are from the last letters that Dickens sent to Forster while writing the novel and living abroad. The passage in the Life is best read as a whole [paragraphing is the editor’s but the ellipses are Forster’s]:
I left him on the 2nd of February with his writing-table in readiness for number six; but on the 4th, enclosing the subjects for illustration, he told me he was “not under weigh yet. Can’t begin.” Then, on the 7th, his birthday, he wrote to warn me he should be late. “Could not begin before Thursday last, and find it very difficult indeed to fall into the new vein of the story. I see no hope of finishing before the 16th at the earliest, in which case the steam will have to be put on for this short month. But it can’t be helped. Perhaps I shall get a rush of inspiration …
I will send the chapters as I write them, and you must not wait, of course, for me to read the end in type. To transfer to Florence, instantly, all the previous interest, is what I am aiming at. For that, all sorts of other points must be thrown aside in this number.[…] I hope when I write next I shall report myself in better cue …
I have had a tremendous outpouring from Jeffrey about the last part, which he thinks the best thing past, present, or to come.”[140] Three more days and I had the MS of the completed chapter, nearly half the number (in which as printed it stands second, the small middle chapter having been transposed to its place). “I have taken the most prodigious pains with it; the difficulty, immediately after Paul’s death, being very great. May you like it! My head aches over it now (I write at one o’clock in the morning), and I am strange to it. …
I think I shall manage Dombey’s second wife (introduced by the Major), and the beginning of that business in his present state of mind, very naturally and well. … Paul’s death has amazed Paris. All sorts of people are open-mouthed with admiration. … When I have done, I’ll write you such a letter! Don’t cut me short in your letters just now, because I’m working hard. … I’ll make up. … Snow—snow—snow—a foot thick.” The day after this, came the brief chapter which was printed as the first; and then, on the 16th, which he had fixed as his limit for completion, the close reached me; but I had meanwhile sent him out so much of the proof as convinced him that he had underwritten his number by at least two pages, and determined him to come to London. The incident has been told which soon after closed his residence abroad, and what remained of his story was written in England (Life 481–82K:9444–62; for the full reference, see endnote 18).
Dickens was also surely aware—though he does not make it explicit in the worksheets until Ws.1528 & 29—that he often uses the house stairs as a setting for moments of dramatic intensity.
The change in function of John Carker follows from the alteration in “Walter Gay’s Destiny”. Dickens adds to his outline to Forster (see above) his initial intention for Walter:
“About the boy, who appears in the last chapter of the first number, I think it would be a good thing to disappoint all the expectations that chapter seems to raise of his happy connection with the story and the heroine, and to show him gradually and naturally trailing away, from that love of adventure and boyish light-heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation, dishonesty, and ruin. To show, in short, that common, every-day, miserable declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life; to exhibit something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations and an easy nature; and to show how the good turns into bad, by degrees.
If I kept some little notion of Florence always at the bottom of it, I think it might be made very powerful and very useful. What do you think? Do you think it may be done, without making people angry? I could bring out Solomon Gills and Captain Cuttle well, through such a history; and I descry, anyway, an opportunity for good scenes between Captain Cuttle and Miss Tox. This question of the boy is very important. … Let me hear all you think about it. Hear! I wish I could.”… (Life 473K:9268–75; see above).
Although Dickens “ultimately acquiesced” to Forster’s advice to “reserve [Gay] for a happier future”, he seems to lose his earlier imaginative involvement in the character.
The manuscript and the first proof read “she had only reckoned up thirteen”.
The numbering of pages is consecutive across instalments, and the same as the single-volume first edition (1848).
The relevant moments marking time passing are: 344–46375–76, the stipulation of the packet; 507–08558, the death of Mrs Skewton; 528582, the opening of the packet after one year; and 569627, the mention of Mrs Skewton's death at Carker's breakfast with Dombey.
This account of the change to a bright blue ink for Ws.72 confirms that of Horsman. He asserts that the long entry on Edith must be made ‘before what follows in brown’ (Horsman 1974, ‘Introduction’, p.xxx). Although conjecture, the account seems a likely explanation of other crucial details, which Horsman does not explore.
It just possible that the entry of the number heading for ch.21 is inserted and that the numbering of ch.22 was initially ch.21. However, Dickens’ changes to Roman numerals are generally more obvious than the proposed changes would be. The last broken underline of chapter twenty-two, positioned under the “II” is probably entered at the same time as the “XX”.
From letters and surviving proofs, it is clear that Dickens often sent the first chapter of a number to the printers as soon as he had written it. See Horsman 1974, ‘Introduction’, p.xlv, and L5:23.
For the first illustration, Dickens wrote Browne a long letter on 10 March 1848 giving him a full account of the characters involved, sometime before he had written the second half of ch.20 (see 3rd paragraph onwards p.136). He received the preliminary sketch he had asked for on the 15th, and in reply asked for a few changes but also told Browne that there was no need for a second sketch “It is so late” (L5:33 and 35). Dickens’s note for a second illustration is just that, with no lettering. Browne would probably be concerned to keep the illustration less visually crowded to speed up production, which regularly involved making a sketch, a copy, and two identical engravings in reverse on a steel plate for each illustration.
Understandably, Browne gives the scene an indoor setting, with much less detail, for the second illustration. He would have had early notice of the more elaborate scene for the first plate. However, though still hard pressed, he and his engravers were quite able to complete the second plate within the nine or so days that remained. He was probably given shorter notice for the second illustration of No.8, another closing scene involving Carker on horseback, on that occasion addressing Florence (see ch.24).
Dickens keeps a record of cuts that he values. Typically, he garners one of Mrs Skewton's effusive half-remembered quotations. See paragraph beginning "Really,' cried Mrs Skewton": "one might almost be induced to cross [...] is his prophet". It re-appears 372406 & n..
The use of bright blue differs in No.9 from its use in No.7. In Ws.9, Dickens makes all entries specific to the worksheet in black (as well as the first five or six manuscript pages of ch.26). In Ws.7, he uses the bright blue for all manuscript pages and for three groups of entries in the worksheet. For a description of the differences see ‘Appendix F’; for a fuller account, see the commentary on the bright blue entries and the biographical introduction in each worksheet.
The following detail is worth noting, as part of the unusual history of the relation of Ws.9 to the manuscript (cf. Horsman 1974, ‘Introduction’, p.xxxii.). One difference, between the published text and the manuscript, relates to the visit to Kenilworth in ch.26. When Dickens writes ch.27, he adds to the Kenilworth excursion an initial morning visit to Warwick Castle, partly to satirise, through Cleopatra, the current vogue for the Middle Ages. In the published text of ch.26, “Warwick … to” (360393) and “Warwick and” (361394) is added to “Kenilworth”. The failure to bring ch.26 into line with ch.27 in the manuscript confirms that ch.26 was unavailable (probably being at the printers) when he composed ch.27.
The editors of ebook 25851 in the Gutenberg Project have ‘to himself’ before ‘both’, which is not present in Ley’s text of Forster’s Life, though it may be present in the text they are editing, Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols. in 2 (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1875).
The character of Feenix opens out, not inconsistently, with the progress of the narrative, one of the many “branches and offshoots and meanderings that come up” (see the fourth paragraph of the “outline” in endnote 42).
Paul Schlicke (ed.), Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.185–87.
At the moment of the Staplehurst railway disaster, Dickens had apparently taken the manuscript of the next number of Our Mutual Friend out of his pocket (L11:56–57).
Consecutiveness in the use of the blue cannot be assumed (cf. Ws.7 and Ws.9). Two assumptions are made here: that Dickens’s tenant used and left behind a supply of watery blue ink, and that Dickens used what was clearly a poor ink because no other was available to him. There may have been similar local circumstances to account for his use of the unusual greeny blue, in the later stages of his work on the double number, while in lodgings in Brighton.
Dickens may have planned for Dombey to welcome Pipchin in some way. Or perhaps the plans for both chs.40 and 41 preceded the composition of either, and this detail of the plan for ch.41 was made redundant by Dombey’s reference in ch.40 to the re-employment of Pipchin—possibly through the good offices of Carker (542598). There are other instances of the pairing of chapter plans, notably chs.33 and 34 (see Ws.11). However, the contrast of hand, as well as that of tone and substance, makes the pairing of chs.40 and 41 less likely.
The collocation “room enough” is derived from Prince Hal’s speech over the dead Hotspur. It occurs once in connection with burial in Shakespeare’s plays (Act V, scene 4, line 94 in Henry IV Part One. See, for example, http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/1kh4_5_4.html). Dickens has an actor’s memory for the plays, quoting extemporaneously whenever needed.
The grounds for placing entries for ch.45 before those for ch.44 are (a) the late addition of the number heading for ch.45; (b) the positioning of the title of ch.44, well to the left, to create space for the summary of ch.44; (c) the layout of the summary for the ch.44 entry (22), shaped around the number heading for ch.45; and (d) the double underline flourish beneath “Mr Toots”, signalling the end of the entries for Ws.14. Another consideration is ink flow, which appears unreliable throughout the right-hand page. Dickens may be finding it difficult to control the ink, possibly re-dipping more often, but more likely simply responding to a reluctant quill. As the ink thins, it appears less dense, e.g. (15) to (19), (21) to (22), (26) and (5). Nevertheless, the progressive nature of the fading ink confirms the order of entry suggested by the layout, that the summaries of both chs.45 and 44 (in that order) follow the composition and titling of ch.45.
Dickens habitually registers his pleasure in the characterization of Toots by enlarging his name. Other instances occur in Ws.115 p.87, Ws.138 p.95, Ws.1612 p.107, and Ws.183 p.115.
The last three manuscript paragraphs of ch.45 are as follows:
Edith saw no on that night, but locked her door, and kept herself alone. She did not weep; she showed no greater agitation, outwardly, than when she was riding home. She laid as proud a head upon her pillow as she had borne in her carriage; and her prayer ran thus:
“May this man be a liar! For if he has spoken truth, she is lost to me, and I have no hope left!”
“This man”, meanwhile, went home musing to bed, thinking, with a dainty pleasure, how imperious her passion was, how she had sat before him in her beauty, with the dark eyes that had never turned away but once; how the white down had fluttered; how the bird’s feathers had been strewn upon the ground” http://www.gutenberg.org/files/821/821-h/821-h.htm#link2HCH0045).
As usual, the editors of ebook 821 silently restore these three paragraphs, adding small changes of their own to paragraphing and punctuation (which in this copy the editor has corrected). The last paragraph pointedly refers back to moments earlier in the chapter (see 600 and 602662 & 665).
Dombey and Son, ebook 821, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/821
Although Dickens seems to have given Forster general authority to make whatever amendments were needed, it seems unlikely that he had particular approval for the cut at the end of ch.45. The cut shows the intensity of Edith’s (and Carker’s) feelings, which helps to motivate Dickens’s plan for their adultery and Edith’s suicide. He was certainly aware that the loss of three paragraphs was damaging. Apparently advised by Forster to clarify Edith’s motives—see Life 483K:9478—he tries to make up for loss at the end of ch.46 (616–18681–82).
The ‘Home’—a refuge and reformatory for about a dozen or so young women who were destitute, abused, petty criminals and/or ‘fallen’—demanded his time and energy, particularly before and after its opening in mid-November 1847. He is the chief organiser and fund holder for the project on behalf of the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. For its influence on his presentation of women in the novel, see Jenny Hartley, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women (London: Methuen, 2008), pp.131–41.; Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (London: J. M. Dent & Son, 1983), pp.341–44; and Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman (Viking Penguin, 1990), pp.86–88.
The List confirms the order of work thus far. It differs from that of Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding in L5:197 n.7. Similarity of hand suggest that the chapter number headings, the title “The Thunderbolt” and the chapter description for ch.47 share the same quill (as they do in the “List of Chapter Headings”), in contrast to the distinctive hand and quill of the titles and descriptions of chs.46 and 48 and entry [6]. Horsman seems to agree with this reading (Horsman 1974, ‘Introduction’, p.xxxiv-v). See also endnote 92 below, for the evidence on the order of entry.
If Dickens were writing for a present-day audience, he would perhaps have kept to his original intention for Edith. However, he re-imagines an outcome for Edith without distorting his earlier conception of her. Indeed the rapidity with which he seems to have taken up Jeffrey’s objection to her adultery (mentioned later in the same paragraph of Life 484K:9485) suggests he was uneasy about attempting to include it. Similarly his initial intention for Walter, who was at first meant to slowly follow “that common, every-day declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life” (see endnote 62 above). However, Dickens has little imaginative commitment to the man who returns as Walter. He does not mention him in his plan for Florence’s journey to Brook Street in ch.61 (see Ws.19&20a38 p.123); perhaps, for a moment, he overlooks Walter, who, as Florence’s caring protector, ought to be included (cf. the omission and later insertion of Mr Toodles’ consent to his wife’s return to the Dombey mansion (Horsman 1974, ‘Footnote’, p.753 n.2).
Dickens estimates accurately the length of the instalment. The proofs for No.15 have only one deletion of any length, a cut of a single line from one of Carker’s self-revealing speeches (not restored in ebook 831); after “Bah” (617681) he deletes “I never respected man yet, and should know men, pretty well”. The tone and substance of the deletion is reminiscent of Iago’s exchanges with Roderigo in Othello. Similarly, the “moving accidents” in Walter’s tales to the young Florence in ch.6 (8084) may be a verbal echo of Othello’s story of his wooing of Desdemona (I3). Dickens’s debt to Shakespeare is less in pointed longer quotation and more in spontaneous borrowings of rhythms, words and phrases.
The order of entry in the commentary contradicts n.7 in L5:197, where the editors of the Letters read Ws.156 to mean that Dickens wrote ch.46 first and then “The Thunderbolt” as the last chapter. Ws.156 can be read to mean the reverse, that Dickens wrote “The Thunderbolt” first , i.e. before ch.46 and the unwritten middle chapter that was “meant to have led up”. This order is in keeping with the pencilled page numbering of the compositor in the manuscript, the initial entries in the “List of Chapter Headings”, and the changes in hand and quill noted in the worksheet’s commentary. In both readings, however, there is the unwritten middle chapter that is clearly referred to in the Life 483K:4979 (and see endnote 118). Herring in his article on the number plans confirms the order of entry that is chosen in the commentary (Herring 177–78).
The cut amounts to three lines at the end of the paragraph beginning “As to Perch” near the end of ch.51:
Mrs Perch frets a good deal, for she fears his confidence in woman is shaken now, and that he half expects on coming home at night to find her gone off with some Viscount, ‘which’, as she observes to an intimate female friend, ‘is what these wretches in the form of woman have to answer for, Mrs P. It ain’t the harm they do themselves so much as what they reflect upon us, Ma’am; and I see it in Perch’s eye’ (Horsman 1974, p.689 n.5, or http://www.gutenberg.org/files/821/821-h/821-h.htm#link2HCH0051).
Dickens’s busy lifestyle creates hazards for even his most well informed biographers. In the passage in the Life referred to here, Forster writes No.14 meaning 15, and 15 meaning 16 (Life 483–84K:9482–85). Modern biographers have the benefit of the work of many other researchers, which can create other sorts of pitfalls. Slater, relying on Horsman, no doubt because of his meticulous work on the text of Dombey, accepts his extraordinary statement that the number plans for Nos.9–15 show Dickens ‘moving forward with very few queries or second thoughts’, whereas there are more queries in that section of the notes than any other (see Horsman 1974, ‘Introduction’, p.xxxii and Slater 2009, p.267). Horsman’s comments on the working notes are occasionally unreliable; he does not give them the same close attention that he bestows on the text of the novel.
Harriet, like Toots and Cuttle, has a crucial role in the denouement. They move the action from one group of characters to another, enabling Dickens to dramatize their interrelation, unwind his intrigues and enlarge his themes.
The revelation accounts for the resemblance to Edith of the painting, commented on by Carker and presumably modelled by Alice (455500). Dickens’s increases the effect of a typically melodramatic moment of discovery by preparing for it with hints earlier (see for example 554610).
The colour of the greeny blue ink has been brightened in transcription for the sake of clarity. Its incidence can clearly be seen in the original. Unfortunately even in full colour facsimile, the greeny blue is sometimes difficult to distinguish from black ink. It is closely described in Stone (pp.51–52).
For a paragraph on Mr Toodles, see ch.59 (793880); for the Skettles, see the second sentence of ch.60 (805892); for Miss Tox, see 829920 in the paragraph beginning “Ambitious projects”, from “Miss Tox” to “in the least”; and for a phrase on Diogenes, see—after the “white line”—the last passage in the novel (833924–25) .
Dennis Walder’s note to the paperback Clarendon text that Dickens ‘had overwritten the concluding number by seven lines’ (Horsman, 2008, p.967) probably following the editors of the Letters (L5:263 n.5). According to Horsman, the proofs went beyond the forty-eight pages allowed for in the number, ‘though not by much’. He gives the overwriting and the additions made to proofs as the reason for the deletion of the two final paragraphs (Horsman 1974, ‘Introduction’, p.xxxvi). However, the first issue of the first edition of the novel, which included all additions and has the same pagination as the part issues, has eighteen blank lines in its last page of print. Moreover, if the additional line that is given to most of the last two chapters (pp.613–24) was added to all, the cancelled paragraphs might be comfortably restored. It seems the decision to delete may have been made for other reasons. The two cancelled paragraphs are restored in ebook 821 Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/821/821-h/821-h.htm#link2HCH0062, as follows:
The voices in the waves speak low to him of Florence, day and night—plainest when he, his blooming daughter, and her husband, beside them in the evening, or sit at an open window, listening to their roar. They speak to him of Florence and his altered heart; of Florence and their ceaseless murmuring to her of the love, eternal and illimitable, extending still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away.
Never from the mighty sea may voices rise too late, to come between us and the unseen region on the other shore! Better, far better, that they whispered of that region in our childish ears, and the swift river hurried us away!
The experience of reading Dickens in parts is largely lost in reading a single volume edition, even if the part divisions are shown. The Clarendon text gives the part number at the top of the verso page and the chapter number on the page opposite, and registers the number division with an ‘END OF NO’ as a footnote or as a line of text. However, to approach the experience of handling a part issue, the modern reader needs the division to be registered much more forcibly, perhaps by turning a leaf to the recto page containing the part heading (part number, long title, date) or, better still, to one that contains the front image of the next number’s green cover (which has the design, number, date, price, long title, etc.).
Of course, backward reference is not possible in the opening number. Dickens disguises this problem by beginning ‘in the middle of things’, which naturally opens the way to supplying the past.
The count of pages is based on the pagination and layout of the first edition, which is the same as that of the part issues (as in ‘Appendix A’).
Comparing the composition of weekly to that of monthly instalments, Dickens writes:
The difficulty of the space [in Hard Times (1854)] is CRUSHING. Nobody can have an idea of it who has not had an experience of patient fiction-writing with some elbow-room always, and open places in perspective. In this form [the weekly serial], with any kind of regard to the current number, there is absolutely no such thing (Life 565K:11849).
Dickens numbers the manuscript pages of each instalment as he writes them, excepting for the opening page of the number, which he leaves unnumbered. Each instalment is numbered continuously across chapters but separately from other instalments. Consequently, when he writes ch.48 (later 47) before the other two chapters, he leaves its pages unnumbered; they are numbered in pencil by the compositor. The numbering of the printed parts, on the other hand, is one sequence from pp.1–624.
Although Dickens does not number or title the new chapter in the manuscript, he does appear to insert a short paragraph to mark the ending of the first day, “So passes the night … home”, which suggests that he may anticipate the possibility of splitting the chapter earlier than Horsman implies (Horsman 1974, ‘Introduction’, p.xlv). He also adds “Many” to the opening phrase of the next paragraph, emphasising the passage of time between the two halves of ch.35. Marking the passage of time by a chapter break was probably another reason for dividing the chapter. Its effect qualifies somewhat Dombey’s rush into marriage.
To preserve the introduction of the counter plot of ch.4, Dickens postpones a chapter on Miss Tox and the Major (a short four-page chapter, written as an alternative to the longer ch.4) then "with great pangs" makes deep cuts in chs.1–3 (see Ws.1, p.40).
Horsman notices that the cut is made in Forster’s hand (Horsman 1974, ‘Introduction’, p.xxxiv) probably with Dickens’s general consent. The cut reveals the depth of feeling that binds Edith and Carker together; the deletion may be reticence on Forster’s part. He had become, by this stage, Dickens’s touchstone to the moral (and religious) sensitivities of his readership. Dickens anticipates the role by his own callow undertaking in the preface to Pickwick Papers not to “call a blush to the most delicate cheek”—the very constraint that he later came to satirise in Our Mutual Friend in the character of Podsnap, apparently in some respects modelled on the aging Forster.
Dickens exploits the same convenient conversion elsewhere in the manuscript (adding ‘I’ to ch.21 and ch.37) and in worksheet (adding ‘I’ to ch.47 and perhaps to ch.21, and deleting ‘I’ in ch.48).
The importance of the back numbers—and of the relation the worksheet has with them—is sometimes overlooked. Dickens would have been sent his copy of the current number as soon as it was issued. Before that, his manuscript would also presumably have been returned with the proofs. For his use of the worksheets in Ws.6a, see the ‘Outcome’ paragraph in p.69.
See Valerie Gager, Shakespeare and Dickens: The Dynamics of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.47–55. She goes on to demonstrate the range and detail of Dickens’s command of quotation from Shakespeare.
Harpers New Monthly Magazine, vol.25, 1862, p.379. See also Butt and Tillotson (p.28), quoting from the article in Harpers New Monthly Magazine. They are misled by its author, Lewis Gaylord Clark, who writes that it was ‘written about this period [Oct.1849]’. Clark, the editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine from 1833 to 1860, was using a number of letters, written to him by Dickens, and confused dates. The editors of the Letters pursue the quote to the Knickerbocker Magazine and give a date for the letter as June or July 1839 (see L1:558). It occurs verbatim in the magazine (August 1839, 14, p.196). The earlier date of 1839 makes it clear that Dickens is referring to the composition of the three earlier novels, not, as Butt and Tillotson assume, to account for the presumed lack of a master plan for Dombey and Son and the later novels. Tillotson does not use the publication of a second edition (1968) to correct the error, believing ‘None of our conclusions is seriously affected’ (Preface to the second edition, Dickens at Work (Oxford: Methuen, 1968) p.11).
Browne’s original sketch has not survived. The published illustration shows the alterations that Dickens asked for.
Though he refers to his “monthly work”, Dickens avoids the term ‘worksheet’, describing the left-hand as “number plan” and the worksheet as a whole as “mems”, i. e. literally ‘things to be remembered’ implying rather more than ‘records’.
Cf. Dickens’s comment on the novel’s title: “I think it an odd one, and therefore a good one” (L.1:615).
The only clear instance of a planning entry (not a query or a postponement) being set aside without comment is Ws.1332, perhaps referring to a cancelled meeting of Mr Dombey and Mrs Pipchin.
H. P. Sucksmith’s article on Dickens’s working notes for Bleak House, although more wide ranging and interpretive, reaches by a different route a comparable position to this conclusion (see Renaissance and Modern Studies 9 (1965), 47–56).
This sentence presumes that Dickens began ch.48 (later 47) for No.15 before the other two (for the weight of evidence, see endnote 87).
After receiving advice from Forster that he should clarify Edith’s motives before the elopement, Dickens replies:
I have not elaborated that, now, because (as I was explaining to Browne the other day) I have relied on it very much for the effect of her death. I have no question that what you suggest will be an improvement. The strongest place to put it in, would be immediately before this last one [“The Thunderbolt” at this stage ch.48]. I want to make the first two chapters as light as I can, but I will try to do it, solemnly, in that place.” (L5.197)
The “place” he refers to is the end of a middle chapter, which he seems to have abandoned. Instead he places “Carker’s state of mind” and “Dark indication of Edith’s state of mind” at the end of ch.46. The evidence for ch.46 being written after “The Thunderbolt” rather than before, as noted in L5.197 n.7, is summarised in endnote 87. The editors of volume five of the Letters suggest that the “middle” chapter might have had more on Carker and Edith, a conjecture that appears to sets aside the last entry in Ws.1420 “the last view of them before the elopement”.
Dickens writes to Forster probably in connection with Pecksniff, about the way characters can “open out”: “given what one knows, what one does not know springs up” (L3:441).
Dickens probably anticipated the innovation in fictional method (evident in Ws.5 and 5a) from the moment he decided that Paul should die. He hints at it in a letter to Forster on 5 July 1846:
I shall certainly have a great surprise for people at the end of the fourth number [the death of Paul, initially planned to end No.4]; and I think there is a new and peculiar sort of interest, involving the necessity of a little bit of delicate treatment whereof I will expound my idea to you by and by (Life 404K:8229).
This crucial gapping tactic is apparently overlooked by Butt and Tillotson in their comment on the worksheet facsimile of Ws.7 for David Copperfield and the discussion of chapter plan and summary that follows in Dickens at Work, pp.25–27.
For the deleted paragraphs, see (833 n.6 967 n.925) and to read the revised passage in context, see the end of ch.62 in http://www.gutenberg.org/files/821/821-h/821-h.htm#link2HCH0062. For a close reading in the light of the ‘sentimentalist tradition’, see Purton pp.135–39.
The last three lines of the novel as published, before the two canceled paragraphs, falls comfortably into blank verse (or perhaps in this instance into hexameters). Dickens defends his use of blank verse, in a letter of 25 April 1844 to Hon. Charles Watson:
I am perfectly aware that there are several passages in my books which, with very little alteration—sometimes with none at all—will fall into blank verse, if divided into lines. It is not affectation in me, nor have I the least desire to write them in that metre; but I run into it, voluntarily and unconsciously, when I am very much in earnest. I even do so in speaking.
I am not prepared to say that this may not be a defect in prose composition; but I attach less importance to it than I do to earnestness. And considering that it is a very agreeable march of words, usually; and may be perfectly plain and free; I cannot agree with you that it is likely to be considered by discreet readers as turgid or bombastic, unless the sentiments expressed in it, be of that character. Then indeed it matters very little how they are attired, as they cannot fail to be disagreeable in any garb.(L 4.112–13)
The conservator Annette Low, who worked on the recent remounting of all Dickens’s manuscripts, notices that the ‘different quills and nibs and change in ink supplies […] give valuable evidence of his process of planning, writing and correcting’ (Annette Low, ‘The Conservation of Dickens’ Manuscripts’, V&A Conservation Journal, 9 (1993), http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/conservation-journal/issue-09
Horsman makes a similar conjecture in connection with the cover design, though without any supporting evidence (Horsman 1974, ‘Introduction’, p.xviii). He suggests Dickens had Browne’s cover design before him, with its picture of the waves of a moonlit sea at night and contrast to the sunlit day (the lower right- and left-hand), when he described the horror Mrs Skewton’s death. The relevant passages are the opening paragraph of ch.41, and its repetitions (559–61617–19).
All references to illustration will be found on the left-hand side of the worksheets, showing that Dickens mentions them as a requirement of the number, though they mostly concern moments in individual chapters. They are as follows: Ws.18 Ws.46 Ws.65 Ws.76 Ws.108 and Ws.125 & 7.
Browne’s own estimate of the time needed to etch two sketches for a single number is in Collins’s Dickens Interviews and Recollections (1:128–29).
In the serialised publication, the illustrations were separated from the text, located between advertisements and the opening of the story, rather like two frontispieces. Given a clue by the lettering, readers would have to actively seek out the relation of text and illustration.
Cf. Lady Skettles's comment "What eyes! What hair! What a lovely face!" (197211).
In manuscript and worksheet, ch.35 is not divided. The title of the new ch.36 is given at proof stage. It also appears in the “List of Chapter Headings” (see ‘Appendix C’).
The quotation is from a general comment by Forster on Dickens's work on Dombey and Son during his "residence abroad" from June 1846 to March 1847 (see Life 482K:9462).
The editor’s experience of reading the underside of the opening of ch.51 with the aid of a strong light source suggests that, although laborious, it may well be possible to read these few titles in the same way. Presumably all deletions might be read with infrared photography as used by John D. Gordon in 1943 and Ada Nesbit in 1952 to uncover Georgina’s censorship of Dickens’s papers (Slater, 2012, pp.112 and 116).
George Ford and Sylvère Monod confirm this point in the Norton edition of Bleak House (New York: Norton, 1977), p.773.
In the manuscript, Dickens instructs the printer to leave “a white line” in the early part of ch.62, after “marriage bells”. He may think of the gap he leaves for titles in the worksheet and manuscript as an imitation of composing practice.