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“... On 25 May 1851 Dickens wrote no fewer than 11 letters – or perhaps it is better to say that 11 of those he wrote have survived. Several were only a line or two, declining an invitation to a public dinner at the Royal Literary Fund, thanking a theatre manager for the use of the stage for rehearsals of his amateur players, and the like. But most were substantial: a few involved business relating to the Guild of Literature and Art, a sort of union and mutual aid society for authors that Dickens was then busy launching; one thanked a Sheffield firm (innocently mentioned in David Copperfield) for the gift of a set of knives; another attempted to patch up his lapsed friendship with George Cruikshank, who had probably been offended by Dickens’s attacks on his temperance pamphlets; another was a long, newsy report to a Swiss friend he hadn’t seen in years and one more thanked a Scottish author for sending a book of literary lectures ...”

“... interest in the working notes as a royal road to Dickensian interpretation. This was followed by Kathleen Tillotson and John Butt’s Dickens at Work (1957), and by the same authors’ ‘Clarendon’ Dickens project, which enshrined a full transcription of the working notes as essential editorial apparatus. If archaeology into the substrata of ...”

“... edition. As each volume appears (the first came out in 1965) the stature of the scholarship of Kathleen Tillotson, Graham Storey and their collaborators becomes more impressive. There are over a thousand letters in Volume IX alone, and the picture they offer of Dickens’s activities during the three years the book covers is more various than a ...”

“... As interesting is Wolfe’s rediscovery of basic tricks of the Victorian writing trade. As Kathleen Tillotson notes in Novels of the 1840s, one of the principal problems for serialists like Dickens and Thackeray was writing to the ‘two unities’ of the part and the whole. It was not something easily mastered and, to be honest, Wolfe in his ...”