Charles to Wilkie

For a class today we were looking at how nineteenth-century novels were serialized in popular periodicals. One of the examples we had out was All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens, because the early volumes featured his A Tale of Two Cities. Well, what else did we find? Right after the final installment of A Tale of Two Cities in the November 1859 issue was the first chapter of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. They were friends, so it is no surprise that Dickens would find space in his magazine for Collins.

What happened next was a bit of magic. Seeing the first chapter of The Woman in White reminded us that we had a letter from Dickens to Collins in the collection. We plucked it out and discovered it was from the "Office of All the Year Round," and was written in late August 1859. For the most part, it is a chatty letter about the business of writing, but two things jumped out. First, the line:

Wills has shown me your note received this morning. I have not the slightest doubt that The Woman in White is the name of names and the very title of very titles.

Pretty cool, as this is the letter that confirms the title of what would become a classic. But then we read another bit where Dickens says that he had just "slided back in the Tale of Two Cities and [had] been doggedly at it." What? A Tale of Two Cities started serialization in April, and it wrapped up in November! Dickens was still finishing it in August.

Can you imagine the stress of finishing a novel four months after you published the first chapter?

Oh, by the way, the letter also discusses the details of a proposed American tour--it is a good one.

To see the letter, ask for MS 001151. To see volume 2 of All the Year Round, ask for Rare AP4.A4 v. 2.

Twisted Travels

Most of us who were educated in the West will recognize at least the name of Don Quixote, the titular character of Miguel Cervantes's monumental novel. Published partially in 1605 and then completely in 1615, Don Quixote is arguably one of the most important works of literature in the Western canon. Cervantes's influence stretches beyond the debt owed to him by other later writers to affect vernacular vocabulary: words like "quixotic" and "Lothario" have their origin in this Spanish masterpiece. As we've blogged before, Special Collections has a world-class Quixote collection, and so we are always finding new amazing little treasures within its rows upon rows of books.

This week, Professor Paul Carranza, a senior lecturer in in the Spanish and Portuguese deparment, shared one of his recent finds with us: a beautiful map of Spain tipped into a late 18th-century edition of Don Quixote. Although we all may be aware that the beleaguered man from La Mancha traveled a long and sometimes tortuous path across Spain in pursuit of chivalric glory, it's not often that one sees the fictional character's route marked out in detail on a contemporary map of the Iberian peninsula. The thin red line that traces the knight errant's course though his country is a wonderful and vivid complement to the long and engaging text of the novel that relates his doomed adventures.

To see the map, ask for volume one of Quixote PQ6323 .A1 1787.