Selected Letters of Charles Dickens

Biographies and other celebratory works have arrived with the bicentennial of Dickens’s birth. Expertly edited by British scholar Hartley (Charles Dickens and His House of Fallen Women), this collection of several hundred letters—culled from the 14,000 published in a dozen volumes—may be the best. It is difficult in tight quarters to do justice to the sheer range and gusto of these letters, written to friends, “to the editor,” and as the occasional leaflet. Dickens touches on myriad subjects: the death of his beloved sister-in-law; sensitive as well as less patient letters to would-be poets and novelists (“I do not regard successful fiction as something to be achieved in ‘leisure moments’ ”); commentary on “the wickedness and levity” of a crowd viewing an execution; and the rupture of the author’s marriage. Among the famous recipients are Elizabeth Gaskell, Hans Christian Andersen, Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Carlyle, and George Eliot (addressed initially as “My Dear Sir”). The book almost serves as a lost novel with the character Dickens as his own hero. A helpful chronology and well-crafted index make this an even better collection, serving to bring Dickens’s classic works even more vividly to life.. (Mar.)