The Letters of Charles Dickens, The Pilgrim Edition - Volume Six 1850-1852

Oxford: The Clarendon Press/ Oxford University Press, 1990. This volume presents 1592 letters, 641 of them previously unpublished, for the years 1850 to 1852. They are years of great activity. Dickens completes the serial publication of David Copperfield in November 1850 and begins writing Bleak House almost exactly a year later. He successfully establishes the weekly Household Words, the first number of which appears on 27 March 1850 (dated o March). His own serial, A Child's History of England, appears in it between January 1851 and December 1853; during the period 1850-2 he also writes about 100 articles and stories for the journal, including many uncollected pieces. In April 1851 he and his friend Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton found the Guild of Literature and Art, a scheme to help writers and artists; to raise money for it he both manages and acts in two dramatic works-a comedy written by Bulwer Lytton, and a farce written by Mark Lemon and himself. During this period he suffers a number of personal blows: the deaths of his father, his baby daughter Dora, and two of his close friends, Richard Watson and Alfred D'Orsay; there is also anxiety over the illness of his wife Catherine. In the autumn of 1851 he moves to Tavistock House, illustrated as the frontispiece to this volume; among the appendixes is the list of imitation book-backs that he had made for the library of his new residence. Hardcover, red cloth with gilt lettering on the spine within a pale blue panel, in red and pale yellow dustwrapper. xxi, 909 pages, two illustrations. 6.25 X 9.5 inches.Near fine book, in a near fine dustwrapper.The dustwrapper is in a clear removable protective jacket.. Reprint. Hard Cover. Near Fine/Near Fine.