THE LIFE
OF
THE LIFE
OF
CHARLES DICKENS
BY
JOHN FORSTER.
THREE VOLUMES IN TWO.
VOL. I.
————————
BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD & COMPANY,
(LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.)
1875.
THE LIFE
OF
CHARLES DICKENS
BY
JOHN FORSTER.
VOL. I.
1812-1842.
DAUGHTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS,
M Y G O D - D A U G H T E R M A R Y
AND
HER SISTER KATE,
This Book is Dedicated
BY THEIR FRIEND,
AND THEIR FATHER'S FRIEND AND EXECUTOR,
JOHN FORSTER
NOTE TO THE PRESENT EDITION.
Such has been the rapidity of the demand for successive impressionsof this book, that I have found it impossible, until now, tocorrect at pages 31, 87, and 97 three errors of statement made in theformer editions; and some few other mistakes, not in themselves important,at pages 96, 101, and 102. I take the opportunity of addingthat 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 sincefound from a later mention by Dickens himself, was presumably of aless wholesome and instructive character. "I used," he says, "whenI was at school, to take in the Terrific Register, making myself unspeakablymiserable, and frightening my very wits out of my head, forthe small charge of a penny weekly; which, considering that there wasan illustration to every number in which there was always a pool ofblood, and at least one body, was cheap." An obliging correspondentwrites 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 precipitouscourt, the entrance of which is just past Salisbury Street. . . . Itwas once, I think, the approach to the halfpenny boats. The house isnow shut out from the water-side by the Embankment."
Palace Gate House, Kensington,
23d December, 1871.