K.C.

As I am a supersaturated Dickensite, I pounced on your book and
read it, as Wegg read Gibbon and other authors, right slap through.

In view of a second edition, let me hastily note for you one or two
matters. First and chiefly, a fantastic and colossal howler in the
best manner of Mrs. Nickleby and Flora Finching.

There is an association in your mind (well founded) between the
quarrel over Dickens's determination to explain his matrimonial
difficulty to the public, and the firm of Bradbury and Evans. There
is also an association (equally well founded) between B. & E. and
Punch. They were the publishers of Punch. But to gravely tell the XX
century that Dickens wanted to publish his explanation in Punch is
gas and gaiters carried to an incredible pitch of absurdity. The
facts are: B. & E. were the publishers of Household Words. They
objected to Dickens explaining in H.W. He insisted. They said that in
that case they must take H.W. out of his hands. Dickens, like a lion
threatened with ostracism by a louse in his tail, published his
explanation, which stands to this day, and informed his readers that
they were to ask in future, not for Household Words, but for All the
Year Round. Household Words, left Dickensless, gasped for a few weeks
and died. All the Year Round, in exactly the same format, flourished
and entered largely into the diet of my youth.

* * * * *

There is a curious contrast between Dickens's sentimental
indiscretions concerning his marriage and his sorrows and quarrels,
and his impenetrable reserve about himself as displayed in his
published correspondence. He writes to his family about waiters,
about hotels, about screeching tumblers of hot brandy and water, and
about the seasick man in the next berth, but never one really
intimate word, never a real confession of his soul. David Copperfield
is a failure as an autobiography because when he comes to deal with
the grown-up David, you find that he has not the slightest intention
of telling you the truth--or indeed anything--about himself. Even the
child David is more remarkable for the reserves than for the
revelations: he falls back on fiction at every turn. Clennam and Pip
are the real autobiographies.

I find that Dickens is at his greatest after the social awakening
which produced _Hard Times_. Little Dorrit i