Bleak House, Research Prompt 2

Matthew Baumback

September 9, 2012

CLT 361

Instructor: Ryan Barnhardt

Research Prompt 2

1. This edition of Bleak House by Charles Dickens contains several sections that serve as supplements to the novel for the purpose of enhancing the reader’s appreciation of the text. The numerous sections provide insight on how Dickens determined the title of the book, his working outline for the progression of the story, and the laborious editorial process. Also included in the supplements are a long list of notes made by the editors and compilers of this edition of Bleak House as well as a chronological timeline of events leading up to and surrounding the composition of Bleak House and its first publication into nineteen monthly installments. This wide array of supplemental sections gives the reader an incredible amount of background information on the text, most significantly in excerpts from letters Dickens wrote to his peers while composing the novel and a brief encyclopedia of names and locales from the text with their relations to real-life people and places. This information furthers our understanding of Dickens’ writing process and allows us to see how and from where he drew his ideas for characters and settings.

2. For this edition of the text, the editors and compilers worked in an excruciating manner to go through all of Dickens’ original manuscript and to make note of the various errors, corrections, cancellations, significant passages, allusions, and differences from other editions. The goal was to compile the text in its entirety and include all appropriate footnotes and annotations to allow for the clearest and most concise understanding of Dickens’ work. This made for incredibly difficult labor because of the general length of the novel, the density of Dickens’ storytelling and creative prose, and most significantly, the near-illegibility of Dickens’ horrific handwriting. With all of this taken into account, the editors were able to comprise a dense and lengthy edition of this text that allows for the modern reader to appreciate Dickens as a prolific novelist.

10 Significant Points

1. “The complete manuscript of Bleak House, preserved in two bound volumes in the Forster Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, shares the usual characteristics of most of Dickens’ manuscripts, though it is in some respects worse—i.e. harder to read—than many of them. Its pages are often crowded, and there are numerous deletions, corrections, and insertions almost throughout.” (P. 803)

2. “Bleak House, Charles Dickens’ ninth novel, was first published in nineteen monthly installments, beginning in March, 1852, and ending in September, 1853. Each installment was written shortly before publication.” (P. 773)

3. “The difficulty of reading Dickens’ handwriting will be sufficiently apparent from our textual notes. His compositors were often baffled. It is not our purpose here to invite compassion for our editorial labors, which were fully as fascinating as they were sometimes excruciating.” (P. 805)

4. “[…] the corrected proofs of Bleak House […] are of considerable textual interest, though the collection is far from complete. There is at least one set for each chapter or monthly part, sometimes two, and occasionally a fragment of a third set.” (P. 805)

5. “It should be noted that neither Dickens himself nor anyone else, outside of the publisher’s advertisements, ever seems to have claimed that the text of these editions had been revised by the author.” (P. 807)

6. “With all these deliberate and, we hope, reasonable omissions, we are left with nearly four thousand textual notes, including all the substantive variants […]; all manuscript peculiarities and errors; all corrections in proof, either established or inferable; all the passages cancelled in proof, and a few significant ones at manuscript stage.” (P. 811)

7. “The other peculiarities and the evolution of Dickens’ spelling will be sufficiently apparent from the textual notes and from our comments on the Cheap, Library, and Charles Dickens editions above and need not be examined in detail here. The only useful remarks that suggest themselves at this point are (a) that Dickens fancied some already old-fashioned spellings (like mattrass for mattress); (b) that there must have been a separate set of proofs for each monthly part, not seen by Dickens, reserved for technical and “house-style” corrections.” (P. 813)

8. The chronology on pages 883-884 is of very significant interest as it pertains to events impacting Dickens’ life during his composition of Bleak House.

9. “On February 21, 1851, […] Dickens remarked in a letter to Mary Boyle about ‘the first shadows of a new story hovering in a ghostly way about me (as they usually begin to do, when I have finished an old one).’” (P. 885)

10. “On August 17, 1851, [Dickens] wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts: ‘I begin to be pondering afar off, a new book. Violent restlessness, and vague ideas of going I don’t know where, I don’t know why, are the present symptoms of the disorder.’” (P. 885)