The ‘fatigue and excitement’ produced by six Spring readings at St James’s Hall, London, ‘in conjunction with a story’, left Dickens exhausted by the end of June 1861. Earlier in May, he had been troubled with neuralgic pains in the face, prompting him to call off social engagements, keep out of hot rooms and avoid late dinners, postpone a scheduled speech at the Annual Dinner of the Newsvendors’ Institution till next year and devote his energy to completing Great Expectations. ‘I have just finished my book’, he wrote to W. C. Macready on 11 June, ‘and am the worse for wear’. Quitting London and returning to Gad’s Hill provided the break he needed. In ‘the first desperate laziness’ of having ‘done’ his book, he joked to Forster, he thought of offering himself ‘to the village school as a live example of that vice for the edification of youth’.[1]
Extravagant jests like this characteristically reveal only a portion of the truth. Although released from Great Expectations, Dickens turned his attention to other professional and domestic matters. A week before writing to Forster, he invited Wilkie Collins to his country retreat so the two together could ‘arrange our Xmas No. please God, under the shade of the Oak Trees’ (Letters, IX, p. 428). Soon afterwards, he issued detailed plans for alterations to several rooms at Gad’s Hill, and entertained the prospect of his boys coming home for the holidays. ‘If I express myself at all incoherently’, he wrote to Collins on 12 July, ‘attribute it to the state of my mind. On this happy day the boys come home for two months – and I am listening in mild despair for the sound of their first Holiday-War-Whoop. I cannot quite collect my feelings, or compose myself with the firmness of a man to meet the situation’ (Letters, IX, p. 438). A more relaxed pace, nevertheless predominated during August and September as Dickens combined doing ‘nothing’ – cricket, rounders and strenuous walks of ‘two and twenty miles’ – with preparation for a new season of public readings, scheduled to begin again at the end of October. ‘Every day for two or three hours, I practise my new readings … With great pains I have made a continuous narrative out of Copperfield, that I think will reward the exertion it is likely to cost me. … I have also done Nicholas Nickleby at the Yorkshire school, and hope I have got something droll out of Squeers, John Browdie, & Co. Also, the Bastille prisoner from The Tale of Two Cities. Also, the Dwarf from one of our Christmas numbers’ (Letters, IX, pp. 449–450).
Volume V saw the conclusion of the serial version of Great Expectations on 3 August 1861. Work on the novel had kept Dickens in ‘actual bondage for weeks together’ until 11 June, only to find the prospect of ‘thorough laziness’ vanish following conversations with Bulwer Lytton four days later.[2] ‘Bulwer was so very anxious that I should alter the end’ he subsequently explained to Collins on 23 June, ‘the extreme end, I mean, after Biddy and Joe are done with – and stated his reasons so well, that I have resumed the wheel, and taken another turn at it. Upon the whole I think it is for the better’ (Letters, IX, p. 428).[3]
What Bulwer said remains very much a mystery, but the consequences of his intervention proved a windfall for successive generations of critics.[4] Less examined is the way Bulwer chose to ignore much of the advice Dickens offered him about A Strange Story, the lead serial to which Dickens handed the baton on 10 August after his own had finished. That advice, patiently and carefully set out in several letters to Bulwer, shows how conscientiously Dickens responded to his friend’s work in draft form and talked through problems Bulwer encountered as he waited in the wings.[5] Perhaps aware of Bulwer’s anxiety that Great Expectations might eclipse his friend’s work and prove a hard act to follow, Dickens seems to have gone out of his way to write tactfully and encouragingly, saying how he looked forward with confidence’ to having such a successor in August. ‘In regard of the story’, Dickens had written months before Bulwer was due to start, ‘I have perfect faith in such a master-hand as yours … You whet my interest by what you write of it’ (Letters, IX, p. 374). Later, and with fewer than three weeks exposure to the public, Bulwer’s ‘new Romance’, Dickens reports, was doing ‘extremely well here, as to circulation. We certainly have not in the least lost ground since Great Expectations finished; and to the best of our belief, we have risen a thousand’. That the weekly sales have not dropped, he added, indicates that we are ‘as solid as the Monument’ (Letters, IX, p. 448). The extent to which Dickens was ready to heap praise on a supernatural story about a materialist doctor who ends up trying to propitiate a rival by offering him a phial believed to contain the elixir of life in return for releasing the woman he loves from a spell – the whole action taking place in a visionary Australia – says something for thrall in which Bulwer held him.
Volume V has little to offer in this category.[6] One exception is a collection of four ghost stories, re-titled ‘Four Stories’ by Dickens and ‘nearly’ rewritten by him. Introduced as ‘derived from credible sources’ and told by ‘the present narrator’ exactly as he received them, the stories are the work of Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards (1831–1892; DNB). Dickens thought the first ‘remarkably good and original’ (Letters, IX, p. 451), an account of an artist who paints from memory the portrait of a young woman who, he learns two years later, died the very day he encountered her by chance in a railway carriage. Curiously, versions of the story were known by several others,[7] including Thomas Heaphy, a portrait painter whom Dickens described as ‘the Artist himself’. In a reply to Heaphy expressing regret that his story had been ‘innocently forestalled in the pages of my journal’, Dickens offered the artist the opportunity to tell his version himself, if he felt disposed to entrust it to him for that purpose (Letters, IX, p. 456).[8] Ghosts of the dead returning and announcing their presence to the living feature in two others in the group, while the fourth about the loss of a silver fish miraculously acquired has more in common with a traditional fairy tale.
The 17 poems published in this volume vary in manner and matter but several have in common a speaker literally or figuratively recumbent as he summons dream worlds based on landscapes both familiar and foreign. ‘Day-Dreams’ (p. 300), for example, offers the thoughts of someone ‘lying lonely, over seas,/ At ope of day’, and closes with an invocation to ‘Kind Memory’ to tell him ‘tales/ Of the good old time’ before he left England where ‘amber-stripéd bees’ float by casements and ‘blossomy hedge[s]’. Another heightened terrain appears in ‘Count Abel’ (p. 181), this time the Medieval woods of Normandy, through which the eponymous Count rides ‘at sunrise, in a girth of fifty spears’, a ‘brave bridegroom’ in search of Lady Madeline, only to find her dead, surrounded by ‘cowléd priests, and wimpled nuns’. Dropping the silken reins, he cries out to God: ‘What foul misdeed assoils [sic] my soul that thou hast/cut my heart in twain?’ He receives no answer; but his men nearby aver that his lady’s eyes ‘did slowly open bright and broad,/ And looked, upon the fallen count, sweet pity, and /the peace of God’. Also set on the Continent are ‘The Old Statue’ (p. 253) and the narratives ‘Christian, the Dol Hertzog’ (p. 36) and ‘Adolfus, Duke of Guelders’ (p. 12), accounts of two dubious figures both met with poetic justice. ‘Sky Pictures in Sicily’ (p. 515) combines a pair of descriptive stanzas (‘The Comet’ and ‘Day Colours’) with the Moon’s challenge to the ‘gaudy shows’ of day, telling a tale of ‘Thoughtful repose’ associated with ‘the lonely temple on the hill’ outside the ancient city of Segesta.
A taste for manses, mildew, the moon and moss continues in ‘Parting Day’ (p. 589) and ‘Old and New’ (p. 228), while the speaker in ‘My Holiday’ (p. 107) draws on memory’s ‘golden store’ to offset ‘the clutch of care’ he associates with urban life. A similar call for spiritual assistance shapes the invocation in ‘The Spirit’s Visit’ (p. 323) while the speakers of ‘July’ (p. 422) and ‘The Starling’ (p. 346) draw strength from less ethereal sources. ‘Misnamed in Vain’ (p. 444) represents an incursion into an aspect of urban reality rarely featured in poetic effusions: one of London’s ‘pestilence-holes’ into which the dead are pitched, ‘charnel-field[s] inappropriately named ‘God’s acre’ by men who grow rich ‘chiefly by fat burial fees’. ‘Lady Mabel’s Lovers’ (p. 373) recounts the triumph of true love as pretty Mabel turns down half-a-dozen prosperous and titled suitors in favour of a ‘gentle student-boy’ (p. 374),who, energised by taunts, fights off his rivals, spurns jewels and kneels to kiss Mabel’s hand, ‘He the poor vagrant London poet, and she the lady of the land’ (p. 375). ‘Guests at the Great Inn’ (p. 82) looks at the life of the convenient Host who greets people as they enter through his ‘open door’ and wonders who will perform the task for him ‘When his nimbleness is ‘o’er?’. ‘Cross Roads’ (p. 131) explores eschatology from another perspective: the final reunion of two sisters, both beautiful, who go different ways, one opting for a selfish, material life and the other for purity and love. Perhaps troublesome in 2010 but not in 1861 is ‘Mohammed’ (p. 59), an account in couplets that occasionally falter of the devious means by which the Prophet ‘ensphered /The quadripartite world’. The deception (and murder), an appended note explains, admits that ‘It is but just to the memory of the Prophet to mention that this poem is grounded on an uncharitable Christian legend, which is supported by no shadow of authority in any Mohammedan record’ (p. 61).
Current Affairs (Domestic & International)[Index]
Lord Palmerston’s Whig-Liberal ministry – formed in June 1859 – continued at the helm during the six months covered by this volume. Opening Parliament on 5 February 1861, the Queen characterised the internal state of the country as ‘generally prosperous and tranquil’. The confidence she conveyed in a statement prepared by her ministers reflected the government’s main concerns. Further extension of the franchise was, for the moment, on hold; deficiencies arising from the recent harvest could be countered by the availability of imported grain, while abroad, a commitment to ‘strict neutrality’ signalled a determination to keep a low profile as the Italians moved towards the unification of their country and the United States towards civil war. England, it seems, was content to look inwards and digest the implications of decades of internal growth. In a summary of the latest figures taken under the superintendence of the Registrar-General reporting in June 1861, the author of ‘News of the Census’ (p. 352) tried ‘to get some more facts about ourselves’ after learning that the population of England and Wales had reached about ‘twenty million and a quarter’, including more than 165,000 men ‘of the army, navy, and merchant service, who are not at home’ (p. 353).[9] Much of this growth was evident in London, whose expansion ‘in respect of bricks and mortar’, saw the total population, in town and suburbs, increase ‘to more than two million eight hundred thousand’ (p. 354).
Four chapters about ‘Underground London’ by John Hollingshead comment on the romance surrounding ‘old London sewers’ (p. 390). Rather than let the imagination ‘run wild’ and characterise the city’s sewers as ‘convivial hiding-places for criminals’ on the run from justice, think instead about civic improvement (p. 390). That can only occur by supporting the Metropolitan Board of Works as the central authority responsible for developing plans to dispose and treat the increased volume sewage associated with urban expansion. Other familiar social issues covered in this volume include the need for tact in treating the ailing poor by not ticketing those brought in as ‘Incurable’ (‘The Sick Pauper’, p. 444), the importance of developing greater skill in the diagnosis of the causes of both natural and violent death (‘Medical Nuts to Crack’, p. 358), and praise for advances in treating typhus (‘Growth of a Hospital’, p. 475). Penal policy was equally pressing, important enough for Dickens to ask Thomas Beard to provide an abstract of a pamphlet on prison discipline, ‘which in the main expresses the views I have often urged’ (Letters, IX, p. 395).[10] Beard obliged, reducing C. P. Measor’s attack on what Dickens described as the evil done ‘by injudicious Jail-Chaplains’ to ‘A Dialogue Concerning Convicts’ (p. 155).[11] Only ‘fancy throughout that you are doing your utmost to tell some man something in the pleasantest and most intelligent way that is natural to you’, Dickens instructed (Letters, IX, p. 395). ‘Work for More Volunteers’ (p. 208) and ‘Children of All Work’ (p. 254) sound familiar themes about the importance of education and the need for protective measures to safeguard young employees. If we grant that education ‘is as necessary to a child as food’, argues the first, and if we agree that the state has a duty to step in ‘if the parent cannot feed the mind of a child’, how are we to seek a balance between the respective roles of each? (p. 208). ‘These are the main questions of national education, and each of them … breaks up into subordinate questions of all kinds’ (p. 209). ‘Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’. Two pieces about the dangers of coal-mining call attention to the daily risks miners faced in that dangerous but necessary occupation (‘In Peril Underground’, p. 61; ‘Fire in a Coal-Mine’, p. 107).
Elsewhere, other articles assume a retrospective note. ‘My Young Remembrance’ (p. 300) adopts the voice of ‘a barely middle-aged man’ looking back on London circa 1830–1831 as he documents what he now finds ‘so many and such strange alterations in this native London of mine’.[12] ‘Great Fires’ (p. 380) uses a ‘recent terrible fire in Tooley-street’ as the starting point for a survey of notable fires both in London and in country towns throughout the United Kingdom. ‘Phases of the Funds’ (p. 342) attempts to bring readers up to date on the operations of the Stock Exchange, ‘regarded by many persons as the pulse of the country’. While fortunes might be won or lost on that venerable institution, ‘Hear the Postman!’ (p. 366) opens the columns of the journal to the modest claims of these public servants for an improved scale of wages. They perform duties of ‘daily and hourly importance to all of us;’ let us grant the postman his request, the writer urges. More varied forms of public dissent are described in ‘The Hyde Park Preachings’ (p. 117), London’s venue for weekly ‘political sproutings’ from voices young and old.
The volume spans the outbreak of American Civil War (usually dated to 12 April, when forces under General Beauregard commenced bombarding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbour). Apparently in keeping with England’s posture of neutrality towards the United States, articles in the journal appear to avoid political commentary. An example is ‘Naval and Army Traditions in America’ (p. 285) – a candid and not unadmiring appraisal of the military culture of America, with plainspoken comments on ‘the present disastrous war’ (285). This, and comments/statistics in ‘American Cotton’ (p. 234) and ‘American “Sensationsâ€â€™ (p. 131) are scarcely incendiary – certainly not ‘belligerently pro-Southern’ as one critic of Dickens’s published response to the conflict argues – though it is already clear that AYR is not setting out to offer anything like continuous coverage of the war. Indeed, with commercial agreements in place for advance sheets of the journal, and matter extracted from it, to be published and distributed across America, and with the possibility of copyright agreements for the sale of editions of his novels there, it would from a purely business perspective, scarcely have been prudent for Dickens’s journal to take sides. Dickens would appear to have gradually developed a clear personal analysis of the causes and likely results of the trouble, which he expressed privately to friends, and went on to publish articles with more polemical thrusts than those in this volume, but it is probably advisable to read each in context of its immediate application and of what is known (if anything) about its authorship, one the one hand, and, on the other, the bandwidth of freedom-of-expression allowed to his contributors by Dickens, as sole ‘Conductor’ of his journal. No generalisation on this head is likely to hold good.[13] Other representative pieces on American topics include ‘Agricultural Exhibition in Virginia’ (p. 78), ‘Two Friends from Texas’ (p. 205) [emigrants bound for New York], and praise for the country’s progress towards an ideal of minimal government.[14] Certainly there is no country, declares the author of ‘Naval and Military Traditions in America’, ‘where the interference and meddling restrictions of a governing oligarchy strike you less than in America’, an illusory goal for which many on the right in the U.S. continue to yearn. ‘Northern Dog and Southern Cat’ (p. 181) and ‘Election-Time in America’ (p. 67), notes jotted down one week before the presidential election in April 1861, point to darker issues: the presence of extreme opinion, polarised parties and violence only barely contained as the country edged towards confrontation over slavery, not the only but certainly ‘the deepest rooted and longest standing’ cause of dissension (p 181).
European politics are virtually ignored in this volume with the exception of two articles related to the training of volunteers recruited as part of England’s military preparedness against possible invasion (Edmund Yates’s ‘Grimgribber Position-Drill’, p. 394 and ‘Rifle Practice with St. Ives’, p. 520).[15] France, however, receives attention in several pieces which feature colourful historical and criminal figures.[16] Further afield, the far east, Australia, South America, India and Africa come in for limited coverage.[17] On 7 September 1861 (No. 124), was published the first of a lengthy series titled ‘Russian Travel’ (p. 558) that would continue intermittent publication until Vol. IX. It was edited by Henry Morley, and anthologised by him in 1866, with a Preface explaining their origin in MSS sent from abroad by a gentleman who knew more than most travellers of Russian Life; not only because he had lived long in Russia, and in its remoter parts as much as in the capital, but chiefly because he knew how to observe and seize at once the point of any character or incident.
The rough sketches thus sent to me I condensed for publication, and submitted to the conductor of All the Year Round who liked them so well as not only to print them, but to publish many more from the same writer. This was a thoroughly topical series, given that on 3 March 1861 (19 Feb. Julian calandar) Alexander II had issued an edict outlining plans for the emancipation of the serfs, which was still, with respect to those held on private estates and in households, being implemented across the empire; state-owned serfs were freed by edict in 1866. [18]
Current Affairs (Cultural)[Index]
Volume V casts a wide net to present an assortment of issues in the news. ‘What with Blondin at the Crystal Palace, and Leotard at Leicester Square’, Dickens commented to W. C. Macready, ‘we seem to be going back to barbaric excitements’. He had no intention of seeing Jean François Gravelet (‘Blondin’, the French-born tight-rope walker famous for crossing Niagara Falls in June 1859); but admitted that he could be beguiled into seeing M. Leotard, the French trapeze artist (Letters, IX, p. 424). ‘Old Rome in Crystal’ (p. 324), treats Blondin’s appearance at London’s Crystal Palace, while ‘On the Tight Rope’ (p. 538), ranges more widely over the phenomenon of ‘dancing on ropes’. ‘Sea-Side Lodgers’ (p. 496), has similar topical appeal, appearing in mid-August 1861. ‘A Night in the Jungle’ (p. 444), by Wilkie Collins, describes the sounds he heard at midnight on 26 June ‘of the present year’ coming from the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, close to where he lived. ‘Cheating at Cards’ (p. 331), offers an historical perspective on the phenomenon, as does ‘Kissing’ (p. 200), which combines taxonomy and history in a survey of a phenomenon limited to man: ‘the only animal that knows how to kiss’. Dogs lick, donkeys rub noses, horses fondle each other’s head; and even ‘low-class savages do not kiss like civilised men; so that we take this habit and function to be actual evidence of intellect and civilisation’, readers are assured. Perhaps the stuffed frogs on display in tableaux ‘in all sorts of human occupations’ engaged in the same labial practice. The author of ‘Something New’ (p. 152), who observed this curious spectacle of frogs ‘preserved with the most exquisite care’ in the window of one M. Verreaux’s shop in Montmartre, supplies no answer to this question. Less bizarre are articles on literary matters: the case for Defoe’s use of Peter Serrano rather than Andrew Selkirk for his model of Robinson Crusoe (‘Robinson Crusoe’s Island’, p. 64), the history of Newstead Priory, Byron’s home (‘The Byrons of Newstead’, p. 282), the clever women of Dr Johnson’s day (‘The Queen of the Bluestockings’, p. 82), and the semantic shifts words experience, often ‘hiding their origin with as much jealous care as if they were ashamed of their parentage’ (‘Wandering Words’, p. 140). Readers were also reminded of the fourteenth century 'Gesta ', a ‘compilation of good stories’ of continuing appeal (‘Awakening Discourses’, p. 297). ‘Wild Oats from Scotland’ (p. 178) provided entertainment from another obscure source: ‘quaint pickings’ – ‘sad, tender, terrible’ – from Robert Pitcairn’s Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland (1833).
Curiosity about the physical world supplies material for many contributions. ‘Arctic and Antarctic’ (p. 54) played into the continuing interest in the world’s polar regions; ‘Marine Meteorology’ (p. 110) offered an overview of questions about winds raised by Captain Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806–1873) in his Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), ‘an indispensible addition to every library in every maritime country throughout the world’, according to the author. Professor Thomas David Ansted (1814–1880), an eminent geologist and mining engineer supplied ‘Treasures of the Earth’ (in two parts, p. 174 and 198) and an article on ‘Recent Discoveries Concerning Light’ (p. 270). ‘Earliest Man’ (p. 366) touches on the controversial contemporary debate over the antiquity of the earth, in which Dickens took considerable interest (see Vol. IX, ‘How Old Are We?’, p. 32). ‘Boyle’s Point of View’ (p. 87) refreshed readers’ knowledge of the work of Robert Boyle, the seventeenth-century chemist best known for his pioneering work on the behaviour of gases. Other articles called attention to recent technological achievements. ‘Costly Food for the Fishes’ (p. 186), reviews ongoing attempts to lay telegraphic cables under the sea, ‘submarine transactions’ which met with success (from Dover to Calais) and failure (the Atlantic and the Dead Sea); Captain Charles James C. Perry’s wonderfully named ‘Patent Anti-Collision Dial and Shipwreck Preventor’ is described in ‘Dials for the Sea’ (p. 304).
Other pieces add to the continuing fascination with animals in their natural habitat. Informative pieces about peacocks, snakes, elephants, butterflies, and gorillas add variety and touch on related issues: the interdependency of different species and also advances in pisiculture.[19] The nearly universal appeal of sweets, the appeal of vanilla to the human palate and the varied practices surrounding the preparation and ingestion of food keep a steady focus on the enjoyable aspects of life.[20] Eating might seem ‘a simple process’; but experience teaches otherwise. ‘The stimulus of festal excitement’, comments the author of ‘Metamorphoses of Food’ (p. 6), the laughter and conversation of a joyous dinner, spur the lazy organs of digestion, and enable man to master food, which if eaten in solitude, silence, or sorrow, would lie a heavy lump on the stomach’.
Editorial issues[Index]
[There are none currently reported on.]
David Paroissien (with additional material by John Drew)
[1] Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim Edition, 12 vols, ed. by Madeleine House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-2002), IX, p. 437, 424, 434. Further references made within the text.
[2] At Knebworth, Bulwer’s estate, where Dickens had gone for the weekend with Georgina Hogarth and Mary Dickens to fish and relax (Letters, IX, p. 423, 430).
[3] See David Paroissien, ‘Clarriker, Pocket and Pirrip: the Original Tale of Dickens’s Clerk’, Dickens Studies Annual 42 (2011) for an analysis of the consequences of implementing Bulwer’s ‘objections’.
[4] See especially Edgar Rosenberg, ‘Putting an End to Great Expectations’ in Charles Dickens, The Norton Critical Edition of Great Expectations, ed. by Edgar Rosenberg (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), pp. 491–527.
[5] See Letters, IX, pp. 374, 401, 407, 412–414, 415–416, 417, 423, 459, 466, 467, 469, 509–510, 515, 543, 546, 552, and also X, p. 16.
[6] See, for example, ‘A Very Likely Story’, p. 17, an elaborate April Fool’s joke by Henry T. Spicer, ‘Adventures of Ali Mahmud’, p. 258, illustrative of the swift changes of fortune and reversals associated with The Arabian Nights, and ‘A Little Dinner with the Captain’, p. 368, about a deceptively hospitable U. S. captain who is outwitted by the narrator.
[7] Austen Henry Layard, Dickens’s guest at the time of the story’s publication in AYR on 14 September instantly recognised the version printed in the journal as one he had heard at Bulwer’s (Letters, IX, pp. 456–457).
[8] For Heaphy’s own account, see ‘Mr. H’s Own Narrative’, AYR, VI, p. 36.
[9] Readers had been alerted to the impending census earlier. See ‘Census Curiosities’, p. 15.
[10] See Dickens’s to Measor, 25 March 1861 (Letters, IX, p. 396).
[11]The Convict Service: A Letter to Sir George Cornewall Lewis [Home Secretary] (1861) by C. P. Measor, Deputy-Governor of Chatham convict prison. Measor’s comments drew attention to the gullibility of chaplains, too anxious to believe ‘pattern penitence’ professed by hardened criminals. For Dickens’s views on this danger and of indulging felons and treating them better than soldiers or paupers, see ‘Pet Prisoners’, HW, I, p. 97; David Copperfield, ch. 61 and Great Expectations, ch. 32.
[12] See also ‘Drift. A Tragedy of Old London Bridge’, p. 130.
[13] See introductions to subsequent vols, e.g. Vol. VII.
[14] Other U.S. pieces included: ‘American Street Railroads’ (p. 40), ‘American Theatrical Experience’ (p. 348), ‘Great Salt Lake’ [Utah], p. 509, ‘American Sportsmen’, p. 564, and ‘Love in Kentucky’ [legal anecdote] (p. 614).
[15] For more details on the Volunteer movement, see Volume IV.
[16] ‘Grand Godard’, p. 126; ‘Memoirs of an Adopted Son’, p. 90 and ‘The Caldron of Oil’, p. 162, both by Wilkie Collins; ‘Lacenaire’, p. 417; ‘Adventures of Monsieur Mires’, p. 437; and ‘The Last Lewises’, pp. 273; 324; 449; and 501. ‘Privateering’, p. 382, treats more recent events: the exploits of French privateers flashing ‘out of Cherbourg’ during the wars against Revolutionary France.
[17] ‘Under the Golden Fleet’, p. 102; ‘Music among the Japanese’, p. 149; ‘Chinese Slaves Adrift’, p. 249; ‘Cattle Farmers in the Pampas’, p. 159; ‘A Two-Year Old Colony’, p. 294 [Queensland]; Sidney Laman Blanchard, ‘India and Cotton’, p. 375; ‘A Fair on the Ganges’, p. 523; ‘Life in Africa’, p. 355; ‘Next Door Neighbours to the Gorilla’, p. 423.
[18] Morley, Henry, ed., Sketches of Russian Life Before and During the Emancipation of the Serfs (London: Chapman and Hall; Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866), p. v, vi; this article reprinted as Chapter I, ‘Two Sorts of Wolves’&c.
[19] ‘Peacocks’, p. 277; ‘Some Snake Experiences’, p. 279; ‘Elephants, Fossil and Musical’, p. 473; ‘A Butterfly Feast’, p. 228; ‘An Ugly Likeness’, p. 237 [gorillas]; ‘Acclimatisation’, p. 492, ‘The Birds’ Petition’, p. 526; ‘Fresh Fish’, p. 260; and ‘Salmon’, p. 405.
[20] ‘Sweets’, p. 247 and ‘Confectioner’s Botany’, p. 462.
