Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The gestation of Dickens's fourteenth and last completed novel developed slowly against a background of major achievements. His two contributions to All the Year Round had secured the journal's prominence among weekly journals; his reputation as a professional reader of scenes from his works stood equally high, consolidated by successful appearances throughout the country over the past three years. In this context, a determination to return to the old monthly format seemed inevitable, particularly since that intention had been thwarted (see headnote to Great Expectations). The transition from weekly to monthly numbers, however, proved unexpectedly slow. Ideas began to accumulate, but a start on the new novel remained elusive. “I am always thinking of writing a long book,” he wrote to Wilkie Collins on August 9, 1863, “and am never beginning to do it” (Letters 10: 281).The scale required for a panoramic novel offers a partial explanation, some sense of which we can gain from Forster's reference to “three leading notions” for the novel that emerge from comments Dickens made in letters and recorded in his Book of Memoranda dating from 1861 (see Kaplan). Among them are threads generated during his “waterside wanderings” for Great Expectations, when Dickens had come across handbills describing “persons drowned in the river” and witnessed the “ghastly calling” of longshoremen engaged ... log in or subscribe to read full text