Foreword
© 2017 Tony Laing, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0092.01
This critical edition of the working notes for Dombey and Son is for readers who wish to know more about how Charles Dickens set about writing each of the novel’s twenty instalments. Most modern editions of the novel, and the various companions or guides, recognise the importance of his working notes. Many contain transcriptions of the monthly worksheets, his “Mems” as Dickens called them. This edition is an alternative to those bare transcriptions. It has twenty-three facsimiles of the original worksheets (provided by the V&A Museum), each of which is accompanied by a more detailed transcription than any published to date, and a commentary that for the first time reconstructs the order of Dickens’s work on each instalment.
In 2011, developments in word processing—particularly the publication in the UK of Word 2010—made it possible to imitate, as well as transcribe the original manuscript.1 This inexpensive software on mid-range computers can reproduce the words and the marks that go with them, imitating their position (orientation, grouping, and layout) and their appearance (size, density, colour and corrosion). Moreover, the production and distribution of an ebook is usually wider and less costly than the conventionally printed book. So now seems the right moment to publish a new, open access and reasonably priced critical edition of Dickens’s working notes for Dombey and Son, the first novel for which he wrote systematic “Mems” to assist him in composition.2
Each of the nineteen units, which make up the central section of the edition, consists of a facsimile of the worksheet for a monthly instalment, its transcription, and a two-page commentary. The latter, unlike other critical approaches to the worksheets, has no overriding interpretive agenda. The commentary merely assumes that the notes are the author’s distinctive response to the problems of publishing a novel that is predetermined in the length of the whole and of each instalment (sometimes formally described as fixed length, stand-alone monthly serialisation).
Although the worksheet reveals how Dickens views his fiction through the lens of the monthly instalment, he devises it in the first place to help him fulfil a growing literary ambition to give more coherence to the novel’s themes and “threads”, i.e. characters and actions. On the left-hand half of the monthly worksheet, he keeps his plans for the number; on the right-hand half, he records the number of the instalment, the number and title of each chapter and, in the space below each title—in this edition called the ‘chapter description’—he initially makes a brief note of the chapter’s content. The identification and naming of the space below each title is important, because it prepares for the later distinction between those chapter descriptions that are written before the chapter’s composition and are plans, and those that are written after it and are summaries. The chapter description, like the space on the lower left-hand half of the worksheet, soon becomes useful to Dickens in ways that he probably did not anticipate when he first devised its format.
He starts writing at the end of June, well before the agreed publication date of October 1846. However, his many other activities quickly shrink the lead-time of three months to a matter of days. From No.4 onwards, depending on whether he managed to make a start during the first or second week of the month prior to publication, he usually has to complete his text for each instalment within ten to twenty days. The usual deadline of the 23rd or 24th, depending partly on the length of the month, was determined by the five or six days (and, if necessary, nights) for compositors to set up and run off, for printers to sew, trim, and cover, and for distribution to begin.
The demand was relentless and Dickens’s commitment unwavering. He was obliged to produce over fifteen thousand words every month, for eighteen months, then in the following final month, to write at least twenty-three thousand. Yet this particular mode—in monthly, as opposed to weekly, instalments—was the one that he preferred. The pressure seems to have suited his extraordinary inventiveness, restless energy and iron will.
The commentary on the worksheet that accompanies each facsimile and transcription begins with a brief account of Dickens’s circumstances during the month prior to publication. It then lists his entries with their function (and marginal number), in the order in which they were made—often not the order of their appearance in the worksheet. The commentary inserts, at the appropriate point, his other associated monthly tasks: the composition of each chapter, the compilation of his “List of Chapter Headings”, and the reading of proofs. These tasks may interrupt both number planning on the left-hand side of the worksheet and chapter titling and description on the right-hand side. Analysis of the hand and layout of the worksheet, the manuscript and the List—together with the ordering in time of the various entries and tasks—gives fresh insight into his working methods, as they change with the progress of the novel.
Dickens’s reputation has been sustained in the last a hundred and fifty years by successive generations of readers and, from Pickwick Papers onwards, by the adaptation of his fiction to the media of the day. For contemporary readers, David Timson makes a brave attempt at delivering the many voices and shapes of Dickens’s prose in the Naxos audiobook of the unabridged Dombey and Son—and the stream continues of adaptations of his fiction for public readings, children’s literature, graphic novel, theatre, film, TV and radio and their vehicles: CDs, DVDs and online/cable transmission.
However, readers whose tastes have been formed by the information revolution often have very different expectations of printed texts. Dombey and Son, a long-winded nineteenth century novel—one of those “large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary” that Henry James maintained he disliked—may eventually be consigned to distant, seldom used, book depositories.3 Libraries, wirelessly connected to the rapidly expanding worldwide web, multiply their PC stations and power sockets for laptops, tablets and smartphones. Like bookshops, in response to market forces, they shrink their ‘classic’ holdings to a few cheap editions on lower shelves.
Research for this edition has taken six years of intermittent labour. During that time, I have been sustained by Dickens’s enduring qualities as a writer of fiction and by a belief that his working notes for Dombey and Son can be used to promote the appreciation of the novel. Reading to recapture something of the effect of periodic publication, like reading regularly shared with others, can be especially rewarding, not least because as Mark Turner says in The Material Culture of the Victorian Novel, Dickens ‘thought about his novels through the serial form’ (Turner, p.119).4 Any reader, by consulting each worksheet in turn, and following him in the creation of the next instalment, may alone or with others add to their understanding of the novel’s themes and organisation.
Growing familiarity with the text will deepen the pleasure that comes from Dickens’s astonishing linguistic creativity and his intensely visual and dramatic imagination. The reader encounters in Dombey and Son—more than in any other Dickens novel—an extraordinary blend of satire, comedy, pathos, sentiment and melodrama, what Paul Schlicke calls his ‘complex orchestration of a variety of literary modes’ (Schlicke, Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.186).5
With two sorts of readers in mind, I have doubled most key references, citing first the text likely to be available to researchers in the field, then a less costly one (or a free online alternative) for students and the general reader. For much the same reason, this edition of Dickens’s working notes for the novel—though all images are to the scale of the V&A’s facsimiles and all formats are identical in content—is available in three ways:
- an online open access version with low resolution facsimiles, but with links to a ‘zoomified’ version of the high resolution images
- as an ebook (epub, mobi or interactive PDF) with low resolution facsimiles and links to a ‘zoomified’ version of the high resolution images, but low-priced and downloadable, and hyperlinked to high-resolution images that will be available on the website of Open Book Publishers, until they become accessible on the website of the V&A Museum
- an on demand print publication, as a paperback or hardback, but with high-resolution facsimiles in full colour, and each priced accordingly.
If the reader would like “a bird’s eye glimpse” of the edition, there is a concluding summary in the ‘Afterword’, p.159.