Table Of Content

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Introduction PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX CHAPTER XXI CHAPTER XXII CHAPTER XXIII CHAPTER XXIV CHAPTER XXV CHAPTER XXVI CHAPTER XXVII CHAPTER XXVIII CHAPTER XXIX CHAPTER XXX CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXII CHAPTER XXXIII CHAPTER XXXIV CHAPTER XXXV CHAPTER XXXVI CHAPTER XXXVII CHAPTER XXXVIII CHAPTER XXXIX CHAPTER XL CHAPTER XLI CHAPTER XI,II CHAPTER XLIII CHAPTER XLIV CHAPTER XLN CHAPTER XLVI CHAPTER XLVII CHAPTER XLVIII CHAPTER XLIX CHAPTER L CHAPTER LI CHAPTER LII CHAPTER LIII AFTERWORD SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY CHARLES DICKENS As a child, Charles Dickens (1812-70) came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A surprise legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary reporter until his writing career took off with the publication of Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success through Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished. Frederick Busch is the author of more than twenty works of fiction, including Closing Arguments, Girls, and The Mutual Friend, a novel about Charles Dickens. The winner of numerous awards, he is the Edgar W. B. Fairchild Professor Emeritus of Literature at Colgate University. SIGNET CLASSICS Published by New American Library, a division of PenguinGroup (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Published by Signet Classics, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First Signet Classics Printing, December 1961 First Signet Classics Printing (Busch Introduction), April 2005 Introduction copyright © Frederick Busch, 2005 Afterword copyright © New American Library a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 1961 All rights reserved. REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. eISBN : 978-1-10107769-6 http://us.penguingroup.com INTRODUCTION: LEFT HANGING WHEN CHARLES DICKENS WAS A BOY OF ABOUT TWELVE, HIS PARENTS left him hanging. He dangled between the vulnerabilities of boyhood and the responsibilities of life on his own in a rooming house in rough-and- tumble London. He traveled between his room and the Marshalsea prison, where his father had been locked away for debt and where all the family except Charles —in order that he earn his salary of about six shillings a week—had gone to live with him. Charles walked through teeming London to reach his place of work, Warren’s Blacking at 30 Hungerford Stairs. The factory was in an old house beside the Thames, and there he covered with paper the pots of stove blacking on which he then tied labels. A boy named Bob Fagin, also employed there, showed him how to do his work. It was a “tumbledown old house,” he later wrote, “... literally overrun with rats.” He recalled them “swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times....” Oliver Twist will be imprisoned by a man named Fagin in a house quite like this one. Dickens never forgot this several months’ nightmare and in his maturity he would write: “My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man: and wander desolately back to that time of my life.” So Charles Dickens was suspended by circumstance and sensibility between grown-up realities and a child’s fantasies, between security and the fairy-tale fear of abandonment that we find throughout his work and, surely, in Oliver Twist. He wrote about aspects of his life, and the realities conveyed by his fiction were matters to him, and to his readers, of life and death. When he was in his twenties, Dickens was a reporter covering Parliamentary debates and important elections, but also writing columns about the parish officers called beadles whom he lampooned in his Bumble, and about slum