Selected Short Fiction
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PHILIP COLLINS, Dickens and Crime, 2nd ed. (1964; reprinted Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1968).
PERCY FITZGERALD, Memories of Charles Dickens with an Account of ‘Household Words’ and ‘All the Year Round’ and of the Contributors Thereto (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1913).
DUDLEY FLAMM, ‘The Prosecutor Within: Dickens’s Final Explanation’, Dickensian, vol. 66 (1970), pp. 16-23 (a discussion of ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’).
GEORGE H. FORD, Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel-Criticism since 1836 (1955; reprinted New York: Norton, 1965).
GEORGE H. FORD, ‘Introduction’ to David Copperfield (Boston, 1958), reprinted in The Dickens Critics, ed. George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961), pp. 349-65.
SIGMUND FREUD, ‘The “Uncanny”’, Collected Papers, authorized translation under the supervision of Joan Riviere, vol. IV (1925; reprinted London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 368-407.
RUTH F. GLANCY, Dickens’s Christmas Books, Christmas Stories, and Other Short Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1985).
GERALD G. GRUBB, ‘The Personal and Literary Relationships of Dickens and Poe’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 5 (1950) part 1, pp. 1 — 22; part 2, pp. 101-20; part 3, pp. 209-21.
ROBERT HAMILTON, ‘The Creative Eye: Dickens as Essayist’, Dickensian, vol. 64 (1968), pp. 36-42.
BARBARA HARDY, ‘Dickens’s Storytellers’, Dickensian, vol. 69 (1973), 71-78 (primarily about Dickens’s novels but relevant to his short fiction).
WENDELL V. HARRIS, ‘English Short Fiction in the Nineteenth Century’, Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 6 (1968), pp. 1-93.
ROBERT LANGBAUM, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (1957; reprinted New York: Norton, 1963).
J. HILLIS MILLER, ‘The Fiction of Realism: Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, and Cruikshank’s Illustrations’, Dickens Centennial Essays, ed. Ada Nisbet and Blake Nevius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 85-153.
SYLVÈRE MONOD, Dickens romancier (Paris: Hachette, 1953); translated and revised by the author as Dickens the Novelist [Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968).
GEORGE ORWELL, ‘Charles Dickens’, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 454-504.
ROBERT L. PATTEN, ‘“The Story-weaver at His Loom”: Dickens and the Beginning of The Old Curiosity Shop’, Dickens the Craftsman, ed. Robert B. Partlow Jr (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), pp. 44-64, 191-3, 205.
ROBERT L. PATTEN (ed.), Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of The Pickwick Club (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
MARIO PRAZ, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, translated by Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1956).
MICHAEL SLATER (ed.), Charles Dickens, The Christmas Books, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
HARRY STONE, ‘Dickens’s Tragic Universe: “George Silverman’s Explanation”’, Studies in Philology, vol. 55 (1958), pp. 86-97.
HARRY STONE, ‘Dickens and Interior Monologue’, Philological Quarterly, vol. 38 (1959), pp. 52-65.
HARRY STONE, ‘Dickens’ Artistry and The Haunted Man’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 61 (1962), pp. 492-505.
HARRY STONE (ed.), Charles Dickens’ Uncollected Writings from ‘Household Words’ 1850-1859, 2 vols. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1968). This is an important collection of Dickens’s ‘composite’ writings as well as a valuable source of information about his editorial policies and the periodical context which gave rise to much of his short fiction.
HARRY STONE, ‘The Unknown Dickens: With a Sampling of Uncollected Writings’, Dickens Studies Annual, ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr, vol. I (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), pp. 1-22, 275 — 6.
HARRY STONE, Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1979).
HARVEY PETER SUCKSMITH, ‘The Secret of Immediacy: Dickens’ Debt to the Tale of Terror in Blackwood’s’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 26 (1971), pp. 145-57.
DEBORAH ALLEN THOMAS, ‘The Equivocal Explanation of Dickens’ George Silverman’, Dickens Studies Annual, ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr, vol. III (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), pp. 134-43, 239-40.
DEBORAH A[LLEN] THOMAS, ‘Contributors to the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round, 1850- 1867’, Dickensian, part 1, vol. 69 (1973), pp. 163-72; part 2, vol. 70 (1974), pp. 21-29.
DEBORAH A[LLEN] THOMAS, Dickens and the Short Story (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
DOROTHY VAN GHENT, ‘The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s,’ Sewanee Review, vol. 58 (1950), pp. 419-38; reprinted in The Dickens Critics, ed. George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961), pp. 213-32).
VIRGINIA WOOLF, David Copperfield’, Collected Essays, vol. I (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), pp. 191-5.
Excerpts from Chesterton’s and Orwell’s discussions of Dickens and part of Poe’s review of The Old Curiosity Shop (excluding his discussion of the machinery of Master Humphrey’s Clock) are reprinted in The Dickens Critics, edited by George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961). Portions of Orwell’s and Chesterton’s treatments of Dickens appear in Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology, edited by Stephen Wall (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970), along with Virginia Woolf’s essay, and selections from Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, Van Ghent’s 1953 study of The English Novel: Form and Function (analysing the style of Great Expectations), Butt and Tillotson’s Dickens at Work, Stone’s ‘Dickens and Interior Monologue’, and Monod’s Dickens the Novelist (dealing with David Copperfield).
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
THE pieces presented here, which span Dickens’s literary career, stem from a variety of locations. Some were collected and revised in successive editions during his lifetime; others were allowed to lapse into obscurity and added to his collected works only after his death in 1870.
‘The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton’ and ‘The Baron of Grogzwig’ are taken from the 1867 texts of Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby which Dickens prepared for the Charles Dickens Edition of his writings, the edition which incorporates his last, although sometimes haphazard, revisions before his death. The selections from Sketches by Boz and The Uncommercial Traveller as well as from American Notes, and Reprinted Pieces (‘A Christmas Tree’, ‘A Flight’, ‘Our School’, and ‘Lying Awake’) are also based on the Charles Dickens Edition (1868). The texts of ‘To Be Read at Dusk’ and ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’ are those of the first editions - the Keepsake (1852) and the Atlantic Monthly (1868). ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’ was serialized in the January, February, and March 1868 issues of the Atlantic Monthly, and the breaks between parts are indicated here by asterisks. ‘A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second’, with Cattermole’s illustration, follows the text of the first volume edition of Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840-41).
The selections from Somebody’s Luggage, Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings, Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy, Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions, and Mugby Junction are based on the texts of the extra Christmas numbers of All the Year Round, 1862-6. As Harry Stone has pointed out in his edition of Charles Dickens’ Uncollected Writings from ‘Household Words’ 1850-1859, Dickens modified these pieces along with some from Household Words for the special Diamond Edition of his works, published in the United States in 1867 at the time of a visit by Dickens,s and an argument might thus be made for adhering to this version. However, the All the Year Round texts containing Dickens’s handwritten changes now located in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library indicate that Dickens performed some drastic surgery in making his selections for the Diamond Edition. For example, the
framework of Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions becomes a single monologue; the word ‘prescriptions’ vanishes from the tide along with the humorous chapter headings - changes which weaken the joke about Marigold’s medical skills on which the work is based; and the extended comic allusion to the All the Year Round format at the end of the first section disappears. It is difficult to appreciate these works fully apart from their original contexts, and a modem edition of the complete Christmas numbers from Household Words and All the Year Round is needed. In the meantime, the present selections are based on the first versions of these unusual pieces in order to recapture, as far as possible, their original vitality.
In each case, the specified text has been consistently followed, although a few obvious printer’s errors have been silently corrected, and a few typographic conventions have been amended (for example, the full stops which Dickens placed after titles have been deleted). Likewise, in keeping with Penguin house-style, single quotation marks have been used first, and full stops after terms like Mr have been omitted. There is inconsistency between the various texts in such matters as italicization of foreign words and some spellings: these have been left in their original forms. Asterisked footnotes are originals.
I wish to express my thanks to the staff of the New York Public Library for its assistance as well as to the late George H. Ford and to Dr Michael Slater for their generously given advice in the preparation of this edition.
TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL
The Goblin and the Sexton
The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton
‘IN an old abbey town, down in this part of the country, a long, long while ago - so long, that the story must be a true one, because our great grandfathers implicitly believed it - there officiated as sexton and grave-digger in the churchyard, one Gabriel Grub. It by no means follows that because a man is a sexton, and constantly surrounded by the emblems of mortality, therefore he should be a morose and melancholy man; your undertakers are the merriest fellows in the world; and I once had the honour of being on intimate terms, with a mute, who in private life, and off duty, was as comical and jocose a little fellow as ever chirped out a devil-may-care song, without a hitch in his memory, or drained off the contents of a good stiff glass without stopping for breath. But, notwithstanding these precedents to the contrary, Gabriel Grub was an ill-conditioned, cross-grained, surly fellow - a morose and lonely man, who consorted with nobody but himself, and an old wicker bottle which fitted into his large deep waistcoat pocket - and who eyed each merry face, as it passed him by, with such a deep scowl of malice and ill-humour, as it was difficult to meet, without feeling something the worse for.
‘A little before twilight, one Christmas Eve, Gabriel shouldered his spade, lighted his lantern, and betook himself towards the old churchyard; for he had got a grave to finish by next morning, and, feeling very low, he thought it might raise his spirits, perhaps, if he went on with his work at once. As he went his way, up the ancient street, he saw the cheerful light of the blazing fires gleam through the old casements, and heard the loud laugh and the cheerful shouts of those who were assembled around them; he marked the bustling preparations for next day’s cheer, and smelt the numerous savoury odours consequent thereupon, as they steamed up from the kitchen windows in clouds. All this was gall and wormwood 1 to the heart of Gabriel Grub; and when groups of children, bounded out of the houses, tripped across the road, and were met, before they could knock at the opposite door, by half a dozen curly-headed little rascals who crowded round them as they flocked up-stairs to spend the evening in their Christmas games, Gabriel smiled grimly, and clutched the handle of his spade with a firmer grasp, as he thought of measles, scarlet-fever, thrush, hooping-cough, and a good many other sources of consolation besides.
‘In this happy frame of mind, Gabriel strode along: returning a short, sullen growl to the good-humoured greetings of such of his neighbours as now and then passed him: until he turned into the dark lane which led to the churchyard. Now, Gabriel had been looking forward to reaching the dark lane, because it was, generally speaking, a nice, gloomy, mournful place, into which the towns-people did not much care to go, except in broad day-light, and when the sun was shining; consequently, he was not a little indignant to hear a young urchin roaring out some jolly song about a merry Christmas, in this very sanctuary, which had been called Coffin Lane ever since the days of the old abbey, and the time of the shaven-headed monks. As Gabriel walked on, and the voice drew nearer, he found it proceeded from a small boy, who was hurrying along, to join one of the little parties in the old street, and who, partly to keep himself company, and partly to prepare himself for the occasion, was shouting out the song at the highest pitch of his lungs. So Gabriel waited until the boy came up, and then dodged him into a corner, and rapped him over the head with his lantern five or six times, to teach him to modulate his voice. And as the boy hurried away with his hand to his head, singing quite a different sort of tune, Gabriel Grub chuckled very heartily to himself, and entered the churchyard: locking the gate behind him.
‘He took off his coat, put down his lantern, and getting into the unfinished grave, worked at it for an hour or so, with right good will. But the earth was hardened with the frost, and it was no very easy matter to break it up, and shovel it out; and although there was a moon, it was a very young one, and shed little light upon the grave, which was in the shadow of the church. At any other time, these obstacles would have made Gabriel Grub very moody and miserable, but he was so well pleased with having stopped the small boy’s singing, that he took little heed of the scanty progress he had made, and looked down into the grave, when he had finished work for the night, with grim satisfaction: murmuring as he gathered up his things:
‘Brave lodgings for one, brave lodgings for one,
A few feet of cold earth, when life is done;
A stone at the head, a stone at the feet,
A rich, juicy meal for the worms to eat;
Rank grass over head, and damp clay around,
Brave lodgings for one, these, in holy ground!’
‘“Ho! ho!” laughed Gabriel Grub, as he sat himself down on a flat tombstone which was a favourite resting-place of his; and drew forth his wicker bottle. “A coffin at Christmas! A Christmas Box. Ho! ho! ho!”
“‘Ho! ho! ho!” repeated a voice which sounded close behind him.
‘Gabriel paused, in some alarm, in the act of raising the wicker bottle to his lips: and looked round. The bottom of the oldest grave about him, was not more still and quiet, than the churchyard in the pale moonlight. The cold hoarfrost glistened on the tombstones, and sparkled like rows of gems, among the stone carvings of the old church. The snow lay hard and crisp upon the ground; and spread over the thickly-strewn mounds of earth, so white and smooth a cover, that it seemed as if corpses lay there, hidden only by their winding sheets. Not the faintest rustle broke the profound tranquillity of the solemn scene. Sound itself appeared to be frozen up, all was so cold and still.
“‘It was the echoes,” said Gabriel Grub, raising the bottle to his lips again.
“‘It was not,” said a deep voice.
‘Gabriel started up, and stood rooted to the spot with astonishment and terror; for his eyes rested on a form that made his blood run cold.
‘Seated on an upright tombstone, close to him, was a strange unearthly figure, whom Gabriel felt at once, was no being of this world. His long fantastic legs which might have reached the ground, were cocked up, and crossed after a quaint, fantastic fashion; his sinewy arms were bare; and his hands rested on his knees. On his short round body, he wore a close covering, ornamented with small slashes; a short cloak dangled at his back; the collar was cut into curious peaks, which served the goblin in lieu of ruff or neckerchief; and his shoes curled up at his toes into long points. On his head, he wore a broad-brimmed sugar-loaf hat, garnished with a single feather. The hat was covered with the white frost; and the goblin looked as if he had sat on the same tombstone
very comfortably, for two or three hundred years. He was sitting perfectly still; his tongue was put out, as if in derision; and he was grinning at Gabriel Grub with such a grin as only a goblin could call up.
“‘It was not the echoes,” said the goblin.
‘Gabriel Grub was paralysed, and could make no reply.
“‘What do you do here on Christmas Eve?” said the goblin sternly.
“‘I came to dig a grave, sir,” stammered Gabriel Grub.
“‘What man wanders among graves and churchyards on such a night as this?” cried the goblin.
‘“Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!” screamed a wild chorus of voices that seemed to fill the churchyard. Gabriel looked fearfully round — nothing was to be seen.
‘“What have you got in that bottle?” said the goblin.
‘“Hollands, sir,” replied the sexton, trembling more than ever; for he had bought it of the smugglers, and he thought that perhaps his questioner might be in the excise department of the goblins.
‘“Who drinks Hollands alone, and in a churchyard, on such a night as this?” said the goblin.
‘“Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!” exclaimed the wild voices again.
‘The goblin leered maliciously at the terrified sexton, and then raising his voice, exclaimed:
‘“And who, then, is our fair and lawful prize?”
‘To this inquiry the invisible chorus replied, in a strain that sounded like the voices of many choristers singing to the mighty swell of the old church organ - a strain that seemed borne to the sexton’s ears upon a wild wind, and to die away as it passed onward; but the burden of the reply was still the same, “Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!”
‘The goblin grinned a broader grin than before, as he said, “Well, Gabriel, what do you say to this?”
‘The sexton gasped for breath.