OTHER DICKENS
113
His correspondents naturally tended to preserve them and they
survive today by the thousands. The known or suspected losses in
their ranks are few. These include the letters that he wrote to Ellen
Ternan, his mistress in his last years, which exist so far only in
rumor; and those parts of his letters to John Forster which Forster
disposed of after pasting the other, and doubtless more significant
parts, in the manuscript of his
Life of Charles Dickens.
In the larg–
est collection of Dickens's letters to date, that of the Nonesuch edi–
tion of his work, they fill three tall volumes of some nine hundred
pages each, and the projected Pilgrim edition of them will probably
be larger by several volumes.
Their sheer abundance is one of the essential characteristics of
Dickens's letters. Without it they would not be that
"auto–
biography,
unrivalled in clearness and credibility," which Carlyle
said they were. They would not be "in themselves a life work," as
Lionel Trilling says they are. Dickens's letters are a life work in
themselves because they are distinct in bulk and partly distinct in
spirit from his life work as a novelist, while being in their lesser
way comparable to the novels in scope and quality. Their scope is
Dickens's scope as the most popular good writer of his day and the
master of his age in many of its extra-literary aspects. Their quality
is his quality as a man and is as plain to see as it is intricate in its
manifestations and causes.
A man of action if any literary man ever was, he writes his
letters not as a spectator of events but as one who is in the thick of
them. Indeed he is best at reporting events of his own making, and
these were spectacular enough. He is no social observer as Horace
Walpole and Henry Adams were in their letters. Of affairs beyond
his reach he is a diffident, even impatient chronicler, unless he can
project himself into them by some feat of comic fantasy.
This
he
does, for example, in the case of Queen Victoria's marriage, which
he proposes to prevent by storming the palace; or in that of the
Crystal Palace exposition, where a tale told of a little boy lost at
the exposition and wandering out into London under the impres–
sion that he was still inside the grounds contains the writer's whole
exasperated response to that famous display of human progress.
Dickens is a man of action for whom the troubled, often fruit-
