In the preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so many readers. In the preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have still to repeat the same words. Deeply sensible of the affection and confidence that have grown up between us, I add to this preface, as I added to that, May we meet again!

In the Bleak House preface the reference to the number of its readers was omitted from the Library and other later editions. In the case of Little Dorrit no such omission was made.

The story of Joe Pythick's friend, as told in the preface, varies a little from that contained in a letter to Mr. Forster, which runs thus: "Went to the Borough yesterday morning before going to Gadshill, to see if I could find any ruins of the Marshalsea. Found a great part of the original building-now 'Marshalsea Place.' Found the rooms that have been in my mind's eye in the story. Found, nursing a very big baby, a very small boy, who seeing me stand on the Marshalsea pavement, looking about, told me how it all used to be. God knows how he learned it (for he was a world too young to know anything about it), but he was right enough. . . . There is a room there still standing, to my amazement – that I think of taking! It is the room through which the ever-memorable signers of Captain Porter's petition filed off in my boyhood. . . . The spikes are gone, and the wall is lowered, and anybody can go out now who likes to go, and is not bed-ridden; and I said to the boy, 'Who lives there?' and he said, 'Jack Pithick.' 'Whois Jack Pithick?' I asked him. And he said, 'Joe Pithick's uncle.'" The visitor to the Borough will find no trace of the Marshalsea nowadays. Modern improvements have swept

it away altogether.

-

Of such models as he had had before him for some of the characters and some of the plan of Little Dorrit Charles Dickens wrote thus: "I had the general idea of the Society business before the Sadleir affair, but I shaped Mr. Merdle himself out of that precious rascality. Society, the Circumlocution Office, and Mr. Gowan are of course three parts of one idea and design. Mr. Merdle's complaint . . . came into my mind as the last drop in the silver cream-jug on Hampstead Heath.' I shall beg, when you have read the

1 John Sadleir, M.P. for Sligo Borough, and James Sadleir, M.P. for Tipperary, one of whom was at one time a Lord of the Treasury, had for years carried on extensive frauds in connection with the

present number, to enquire whether you consider 'Bar' an instance of a suggested likeness in not many touches."1 Flora is supposed to have been taken for the lady who sat for Dora in David Copperfield, as she appeared after the lapse of years and without the halo of romance, but I confess I have always found considerable difficulty in believing that.

One great historical occasion is, oddly enough, connected with Little Dorrit. When Bismarck and Jules Favre were trying to find some basis of negotiation at Versailles, beforethe siege of Paris had begun in real earnest, Von Moltke was seated in a corner reading Little Dorrit. Mr. Forster says "Who will doubt that the chapter on How Not To Do It was then absorbing the old soldier's attention?" but it is at least possible that the attention which the old soldier was giving to his book was not of a very absorbing kind, and that any other volume would probably, under the circumstances, have answered his purpose just as well.

Extremely sensitive as he was to praise and blame, it was a habit with Charles Dickens to avoid reading criticisms on his books or himself, but Little Dorrit furnished two exceptions to this rule. The first case did not seriously affect, although, for the time, it may have annoyed him. "I was ludicrously foiled here the other night," he wrote, "in a resolution I have kept for twenty years, not to know of any attack upon myself, by stumbling, before I could pick myself up, on a short extract in the Globe from Blackwood's Magazine, informing me that Little Dorrit is Twaddle.' I was sufficiently put out by it to be angry with myself for being such a fool, and then pleased with myself for having so long been constant to a good resolution." But the second case was of far greater importance. An article in the Edinburgh Review contained imputations of so serious a kind on his conscientiousness as a writer that he felt bound to take notice of it, and accordingly published the following temTipperary Bank, the Royal Swedish Railway, and other swindles. When the crash came, John Sadleir committed suicide on Hampstead Heath, on the 16th of February, 1856, by swallowing, from a silver cream-jug, a quantity of essential oil of almonds. James Sadleir absconded, and was expelled the House of Commons by resolution moved by the Attorney-General for Ireland.

1 "Bar" was taken from Sir Fitzroy Kelly - Attorney-General in Lord Derby's second Ministry, 1858, and afterwards Chief Baron of the Exchequer - and was acknowledged to be a singularly good

likeness.

perate but crushing reply in No. 384 of Household Words, dated the 1st of August, 1857:

66

CURIOUS MISPRINT IN THE EDINBURGH REVIEW."

The Edinburgh Review, in an article in its last number, on "The License of Modern Novelists," is angry with Mr. Dickens and other modern novelists, for not confining themselves to the mere amusement of their readers, and for testifying in their works that they seriously feel the interest of true Englishmen in the welfare and honour of their country. To them should be left the making of easy occasional books for idle young gentlemen and ladies to take up and lay down on sofas, drawing-room tables, and window seats; to the Edinburgh Review should be reserved the settlement of all social and political questions, and the strangulation of all complainers. Mr. Thackeray may write upon Snobs, but there must be none in the superior government departments. There is no positive objection to Mr. Reade having to do, in a Platonic way, with a Scottish fishwoman or so; but he must by no means connect himself with Prison Discipline. That is the unalienable property of official personages; and, until Mr. Reade can show that he has so much a year, paid quarterly, for understanding (or not understanding) the subject, it is none of his, and it is impossible that he can be allowed to deal with it.

The name of Mr. Dickens is at the head of this page, and the hand of Mr. Dickens writes this paper. He will shelter himself under no affectation of being any one else, in having a few words of earnest but temperate remonstrance with the Edinburgh Review, before pointing out its curious misprint. Temperate, for the honour of Literature; temperate, because of the great services which the Edinburgh Review has rendered in its time to good literature, and good government; temperate, in remembrance of the living affection of Jeffrey, the friendship of Sydney Smith, and the faithful sympathy of both.

The License of Modern Novelists is a taking title. But it suggests another-the License of Modern Reviewers. Mr. Dickens's libel on the wonderfully exact and vigorous English government, which is always ready for any emergency, and which, as everybody knows, has never shown itself to be at all feeble at a pinch within the memory of men, is License in a novelist. Will the Edinburgh Review forgive Mr. Dickens for taking the liberty to point out what is License in a Reviewer?

"Even the catastrophe in Little Dorrit is evidently borrowed from the recent fall of houses in Tottenham Court Road, which happens to have appeared in the newspapers at a convenient period."

Thus, the Reviewer. The Novelist begs to ask him whether there is no license in his writing those words and stating that assumption as a truth, when any man accustomed to the critical examination of a book cannot fail, attentively turning over the

pages of Little Dorrit, to observe that that catastrophe is carefully prepared for from the very first presentation of the old house in the story; that when Rigaud, the man who is crushed by the fall of the house, first enters it (hundreds of pages before the end) he is beset by a mysterious fear and shuddering; that the rotten and crazy state of the house is laboriously kept before the reader, whenever the house is shown; that the way to the demolition of the man and the house together, is paved all through the book with a painful minuteness and reiterated care of preparation, the necessity of which (in order that the thread may be kept in the reader's mind through nearly two years), is one of the adverse incidents of that serial form of publication? It may be nothing to the question that Mr. Dickens now publicly declares, on his word and honour, that that catastrophe was written, was engraved on steel, was printed, had passed through the hands of compositors, readers for the press, and pressmen, and was in type and in proof in the Printing House of Messrs. Bradbury & Evans, before the accident in Tottenham Court Road occurred. But, it is much to the question that an honourable reviewer might have easily traced this out in the internal evidence of the book itself, before he stated for a fact, what is utterly and entirely, in every particular and respect, untrue. More; if the Editor of the Edinburgh Review 1 (unbending from the severe official duties of a blameless branch of the Circumlocution Office) had happened to condescend to cast his eye on the passage, and had referred even its mechanical probabilities and improbabilities to his publishers, those experienced gentlemen must have warned him that he was getting into danger; must have told him that on a comparison of dates, and with a reference to the number printed of Little Dorrit, with that very incident illustrated, and to the date of the publication of the completed book in volume, they hardly perceived how Mr. Dickens could have waited, with such a desperate Micawberism, for a fall of houses in Tottenham Court Road, to get him out of his difficulties, and yet could have come up to time with the needful punctuality. Does the Edinburgh Review make no charges at random? Does it live in a blue and yellow glass house, and yet throw such big stones over the roof? Will the licensed Reviewer apologise to the licensed Novelist, for his little Circumlocution Office? Will he "examine the justice" of his own "general charges" as well as Mr. Dickens's? Will he apply his own words to himself, and come to the conclusion that it really is "a little curious to consider what qualifications a man ought to possess, before he could with any kind of propriety hold this language"?

The Novelist now proceeds to the Reviewer's curious misprint. The Reviewer, in his laudation of the great official departments, and in his indignant denial of there being any trace of a Circumlocution Office to be detected among them all, begs to know, "what

1 The Editor of the Edinburgh Review at this time was Mr. Henry Reeve, who also held the post of Registrar of the Privy Council.

does Mr. Dickens think of the whole organisation of the Post Office, and of the system of cheap Postage?" Taking St. Martin'sle-grand in tow, the wrathful Circumlocution steamer, puffing at Mr. Dickens to crush him with all the weight of that first-rate vessel, demands, "to take a single and well-known example, how does he account for the career of Mr. Rowland Hill? A gentleman in a private and not very conspicuous position, writes a pamphlet recommending what amounted to a revolution in a most important department of the Government. Did the Circumlocution Office neglect him, traduce him, break his heart, and ruin his fortune? They adopted his scheme, and gave him the leading share in carrying it out, and yet this is the government which Mr. Dickens declares to be a sworn foe to talent, and a systematic enemy to ingenuity."

The curious misprint, here, is the name of Mr. Rowland Hill. Some other and perfectly different name must have been sent to the printer. Mr. Rowland Hill!! Why, if Mr. Rowland Hill were not, in toughness, a man of a hundred thousand; if he had not had in the struggles of his career a steadfastness of purpose overriding all sensitiveness, and steadily staring grim despair out of countenance, the Circumlocution Office would have made a dead inan of him long and long ago.

The article then proceeds to give a short account of Mr. (afterwards Sir) Rowland Hill's tussle with the Circumlocution Office of his day, and concludes with the following temperate demand for an apology for the injustice which had been done to the novelist:

But the name is evidently a curious misprint and an unfortunate mistake. The Novelist will await the Reviewer's correction of the press, and substitution of the right name.

Will the Edinburgh Review also take its next opportunity of manfully expressing its regret that in too distempered a zeal for the Circumlocution Office, it has been betrayed, as to that Tottenham Court Road assertion, into a hasty substitution of untruth for truth; the discredit of which, it might have saved itself, if it had been sufficiently cool and considerate to be simply just? It will, too possibly, have much to do by that time in championing its Circumlocution Office in new triumphs on the voyage out to India (God knows that the Novelist has his private as well as his public reasons for writing the foreboding with no triumphant heart!); 1 but even party occupation, the reviewer's license, or the editorial plural, does not absolve a gentleman from a gentleman's duty, a gentleman's restraint, and a gentleman's generosity.

1 This was written at the time of the Indian Mutiny, when Charles Dickens's second son, Walter Landor, was on his way to Calcutta to take up his commission in the East India Company's military service.