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Dickens Versus Thackeray: The Garrick Club Affair

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Gordon N. Ray*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana

Extract

It may seem surprising that there is reason today to reexamine a more or less public episode in the lives of two major English writers of the last century. For nearly seventy years there has existed among biographers of Dickens what might almost be termed an official version of the so-called Garrick Club affair, that provided by Edmund Yates in his Recollections and Experiences of 1884. Because of the absence of an authoritative Thackerayan biographical tradition, there has been no full statement of Thackeray's side of the case. Thackeray's biographers have tended to rely instead on Yates's testimony not merely for much of the detail but even for the structure of their narratives of this incident in his life. Some of them have supplemented Recollections and Experiences with John Cordy Jeaffreson's Book of Recollections (1894) and more recently with the late Walter Dexter's edition of Dickens' Letters (1938) and with my edition of Thackeray's Letters and Private Papers (1945-46), but by relying primarily on Yates instead of thinking the problem through for themselves, they have arrived at much the same story as that provided by Dickens' biographers. Malcolm Elwin's Thackeray: a Personality (1932) constitutes an honorable exception to this generalization, but Elwin did not attempt a comprehensive treatment of the Garrick Club affair, nor did he have access to much significant manuscript material which has come to light since he wrote.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954

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