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Nobody knew Dickens better than John Forster. They met as young men, and for more than thirty years Dickens told him everything, showed him every plan, and trusted him with the secrets, including the blacking factory childhood he hid from the world. After Dickens died in 1870, Forster wrote this great biography from the letters and his own memory. It is long, loving, and irreplaceable.
John Forster (1812 to 1876) met Dickens in 1836 and became the friend of his life: first reader of every manuscript, adviser in every crisis, executor and keeper of his papers. Dickens gave him the autobiographical fragment describing the blacking warehouse, on the understanding that it would appear only after his death, and Forster's biography, published in three volumes between 1872 and 1874, was the first place the world read it. No life of Dickens can replace this one, because no one else was there.
The sixty four chapters are arranged by years and filled with Dickens's own letters, which Forster prints in profusion. Volume I runs from the Portsmouth childhood, Chatham, the Marshalsea, and the shorthand years, through the Pickwick triumph to the American journey of 1842. Volume II covers the years of Dombey, Copperfield, and Bleak House's beginnings, Italy, Switzerland, and the great readings' approach. Volume III reaches the last novels, the Gadshill years, the farewell readings, and the final chapter, The End.
This text follows the Boston Osgood edition of 1875, three volumes in two, and is complete in the life itself. Contents pages, chapter synopses, footnotes, the writings appendix, and the index were dropped as apparatus.
John Forster was Dickens's closest friend, his literary adviser, and the keeper of his letters and papers, and this is the life Dickens himself planned for him to write. Three volumes, published between 1872 and 1874, follow the novelist from his Portsmouth childhood and the blacking factory through fame, America, and the great novels to his death in 1870. The Osgood edition of 1875, three volumes in two, is the text here.
The life opens with its dedication, to Dickens's daughters Mary and Kate, Forster's goddaughter and her sister, from their friend and their father's friend and executor, and with Forster's Note to the Present Edition, dated Palace Gate House, Kensington, December 23, 1871, correcting errors in the first volume's early pages. Volume I then runs in twenty four chapters from Childhood through Hard Experiences in Boyhood, the blacking warehouse and the Marshalsea, the shorthand and reporting years, the Pickwick explosion, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, and the Barnaby Rudge and Old Curiosity Shop years, to the American journey of 1842, each chapter carrying its printed title and its span of years. A second frontispiece of corrections opens Volume II, whose twenty chapters cover the Martin Chuzzlewit and Christmas book years, Italy and Switzerland, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and Bleak House's beginnings, ending in the early eighteen fifties. Volume III's twenty chapters carry the story through Hard Times, Little Dorrit, the uncommercial traveller, the great public readings, Our Mutual Friend, and the unfinished Edwin Drood, to the final chapter, The End, which closes on the words cut over Dickens's grave in Westminster Abbey. The biography is complete in all three volumes.
Edition: Forster's Life complete in its three volumes (first published 1872-1874), shelved from the Osgood edition of 1875, whose title page reads Three Volumes in Two. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 25851.
The first chapter
SUCH has been the rapidity of the demand for successive impressions of this book, that I have found it impossible, until now, to correct at pages 31, 87, and 97 three errors of statement made in the former editions; and some few other mistakes, not in themselves important, at pages 96, 101, and 102. I take the opportunity of adding that the mention at p. 83 is not an allusion to the well-known "Penny" and "Saturday" Magazines, but to weekly periodicals of some years' earlier date resembling them in form. One of them, I have since found from a later mention by Dickens himself, was presumably of a less wholesome and instructive character. "I used," he says, "when I was at school, to take in the Terrific Register, making myself unspeakably miserable, and frightening my very wits out of my head, for the small charge of a penny weekly; which, considering that there was an illustration to every number in which there was always a pool of blood, and at least one body, was cheap." An obliging correspondent writes to me upon my reference to the Fox-under-the-hill, at p. 62: "Will you permit me to say that the house, shut up and almost ruinous, is still to be found at the bottom of a curious and most precipitous court, the entrance of which is just past Salisbury Street. . . . It was once, I think, the approach to the halfpenny boats. The house is now shut out from the water-side by the Embankment."
PALACE GATE HOUSE, KENSINGTON, _23d December, 1871_.
Continue: Volume II: Corrections Made in the Later Editions of the First Volume
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1872-1874. Author died 1876. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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