The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens

• Eagerly awaited, this selection from the twelve-volume British Academy Pilgrim Edition gives Dickens lovers, students, and scholars everywhere their first chance to access this unique treasure-trove
• These letters take us straight to the heart of Dickens's life and we see him as a novelist, journalist, social campaigner, friend, lover, husband, and father
• Examples included extend from his earliest writing as a schoolboy of thirteen, right up to the last afternoon of his life, just before he suffered his fatal stroke
• By turns touching and humorous, boisterous and caustic, the letters are imbued with Dickens's highly distinctive personality

Readership: Lovers of Dickens; general readers of Victorian novels; students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature

Edited by Jenny Hartley, Professor of English Literature, Roehampton University

Jenny Hartley is Professor of English Literature at Roehampton University. She is the author of two books on British women's writing from the Second World War, and The Reading Groups Book, a pioneering survey of reading groups. Her most recent book, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, published by Methuen in 2008, was picked Guardian 'Book of the Week' and described as 'brilliant' by Claire Tomalin. For the last ten years she has been a leading member of the Prison Reading Groups project.

"Glorious. This is a book for which readers have been waiting for a very long time. It takes you directly, in Dickens's own words, and with incomparable vividness, into his extraordinary life and mind. The notes and editorial matter deftly paint in the background to provide a detailed and constantly astonishing portrait of one of the most interesting men who ever lived." - Simon Callow

"Among the dozens of Dickens publications connected with the bicentenary of the author's birth ... it is hard to imagine one more necessary than this" - Times Literary Supplement

"glorious letters reflecting every facet of Dickens's life; should not be missed" - The Sunday Times

"This is Dickens by Dickens. Whatever comes out in this bicentenary year, do not miss it." - The Sunday Times

"(Hartley's) selection is a miracle of compression and editorial tact" - New Statesman

"Dickens lovers will all be grateful to Hartley for her skill and judgement." - Literary Review

"Edited with unobtrusive intelligence and insight by Jenny Hartley" - The Independent

"a marvellous volume" - The Scotsman

"It's a thrilling, surprisingly fresh book." - The Evening Standard

"An absolute gem ... reads better than any actual novel Dickens ever wrote ... Hartley would please a great many readers by producing a second volume from the same dragon-hoard ... A typically classy Oxford affair" - Open Letters

"This is the book we have all been waiting for ... Every reader has his or her favourite aspect of Dickens, and may miss a particular letter or letters - I am no exception. But I do not think anyone could have made a more balanced selection from the embrarrassment of riches in his letters, or justified her choices more persuasively. We are all in Professor Hartley's debt for her magnificent edition." - Dickens Quarterly

"The 450 [letters] included in The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley, are more revealing and more intimate than any biography." - Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Charles Dickens
Abbreviations and Symbols
SELECTED LETTERS
Index