Reference assistant Amber Bowes highlights a lesser-known work of Charles Dickens in this exciting first installation of a two-part blog post!
Charles Dickens is remembered by most of the world as a great novelist and a key figure in Victorian England at its height and generally thought of as a nearly mythic representative of Englishness and the English novel. Undeniably, Dickens has breadth, as both the author of such heartbreaking love stories as The Tale of Two Cities (1859) and the one and only originator of the phrase “bah humbug.” In the over 150 years after his death, scholars and fans have sorted through his work and life with a fine-tooth comb, finding plenty to admire and plenty—perhaps more—to criticize.
But for now, I’d like to shift focus from Dickens’s oversized legacy by looking into one of his least successful and least studied ventures: educational history books. I came across a beautiful old edition of his A Child’s History of England (1852-54) at the Lilly when researching for a project in Rebecca Baumann’s Rare Book Librarianship course. I was immediately drawn in by the book’s small size and the scribbles left on its fancy pages. Let’s explore it not for the artistry of its composition (which, by all accounts, is not very great), but for the record of printing and reading which its pages reveal.
What was A Child’s History of England? Who read it?
Dickens’s best-known and most-adapted work remains his family-friendly fable A Christmas Carol (1843). Other Dickens classics (Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations (1861), we could go on…) also focus on the experience of childhood and remain beloved, in part, for Dickens’s ability to remind adult readers how it felt to perceive the world through childish eyes. Dickens often worked with the circumstances and education of English children in mind; his A Child’s History of England is one of those projects which, though not flashy in and of itself, gives a window into Victorian ideas of how young minds function. Dickens attempted, in this project, to provide children with a history lesson that neither treated English monarchs with reverence nor lingered on boring dates and numbers. The work “was chiefly composed via dictation,” and like much of Dickens’s work, emphasized “a high degree of orality” in its narrative style, encouraging children to perform and take interest in history (Stein; Wales 91).
This edition of A Child’s History was printed in three volumes in 1850s London and is now housed, after nearly 200 years and across the Atlantic Ocean, at the Lilly Library. Collected into one protective case, each volume has a gilt design on the cover, gilt title and scrolling on the spine, and marbled endpapers and edges. Each volume is just a couple inches too large to count as a miniature book—thoughtfully sized for a child’s grasp. Such intentional design and adornment would likely strike a modern reader upon first glance.
What may be less immediately clear is that one of the great markers of this book’s high printing cost is its three-volume format. Richard Menke, scholar of literature and book history at the University of Georgia, writes that the “triple-decker,” as editions like this are often called, “wasn’t priced for sale to general readers at all” in the mid-late nineteenth century; instead, “the main buyers of novels in this expensive format were the private circulating libraries that came to dominate the trade in new fiction” (Menke 97). These circulating libraries, charging a regular fee for membership, could buy an expensive triple-decker book and lend it out to three different subscribers at once, on account of the three-volume format.
Menke writes that “fiction in three volumes might have appeared in periodicals beforehand,” and that “if a novel succeeded as a triple-decker, it might appear in a single volume later” (97). Indeed, A Child’s History was first published in Household Words, a serial publication which Dickens ran throughout the 1850s and which was cost-accessible to a large swath of the Victorian public. Later editions of the History were published in a single volume and used by English schools as a teaching tool (Wales 94). In its triple-decker form, it was special: a Christmas gift or for those in well-stocked library circuits. The children it was meant for were the comfortable children of discerning parents who “endowed triple-deckers with value as a ‘higher class of fiction’”—who saw in a triple-decker something that was “not full of expensive illustrations to be gawked at but text to be read,” and who judged by its costly formatting that it must have already passed some tacit evaluation of value before even reaching shop shelves (Menke 98). Young upper-middle-class sons and daughters would’ve read from or been read to out of this edition. Sons, because Dickens “explicitly conceived of this project as a ‘boy’s book’” and “clearly relished the gruesome sensationalism and irony that he incorporated across the history,” and daughters because, as Katie Wales points out in her study of the project, young girls were the most likely to benefit from the story’s dramatic orality: they were most often read aloud to by their more educated brothers (Stein; Wales 96).
Reading from (and writing in) A Child’s History of England
This edition of A Child’s History was possibly part of a lending library, or handled by a well-to-do family’s various children, as its three volumes have different degrees of wear and tear among them, indicating different readers. Looking at the scribbles and scratches (and, once, a fingerprint immortalized in lead) on the pages of A Child’s History makes it easy to imagine different sets of grubby small hands clutching the book as children sit on a parent’s or an older sibling’s lap to read. In some sections—such as the one pictured below—someone has underlined seemingly random words across a sentence or two, as if helping themselves stay on track while reading or helping a younger reader with their pronunciation.
On other pages, someone has kept track of each line of text with their own penciled dashes in the book’s margins. In a separate instance (below), it looks as if someone might have been practicing their handwriting by replicating the printed comma.
Other scholars studying nineteenth-century reading habits, such as Deborah Lutz, have pointed out that the more polite way to mark favorite passages when reading from a shared book (as this A Child’s History likely was) would be fingernail-denting the page – though this was still, to some fellow-readers, irritating (Lutz 13). The graphite and ink in these volumes may then be a sign that this triple-decker was held in just one family’s personal library, or perhaps, that if this set ever was in a shared library, its children readers could not be held to an adult’s standard of self-restraint in their habits of annotation.
The book’s most touching annotations speak to the performance element, noted by Wales and Stein, in Dickens’s writing and in the reading practices of Victorian families. Throughout A Child’s History, someone has written what appears to be the word “clap” or “claps” here and there in the margins. It could be the annotation “class,” using a long-s, but by the mid-nineteenth century, the long “s” (which looks like an “f”) was out of fashion, so it is unlikely that anyone of school-going age would be using it. We might imagine either an instructor marking sections to assign or a family member marking favored sections to perform. Sometimes the word seems casually jotted down, and sometimes it is repeatedly underlined in seeming excitement, but, in any case, the notes tell us that, once upon a time, a user of this book probably read the book aloud and probably cared what their audience thought of the performance. This small record of approval, preserved on library shelves, might be all that is left in the world of the unknown orator.
This examination of the A Child’s History edition held at the Lilly Library is continued in a second blog post, “Collecting Charles Dickens’ A Child’s History of England.”
About the author: Amber Bowes is a PhD student at Indiana University Bloomington, where she studies nineteenth-century literature and culture. Her dissertation tracks the development and reception of kitsch aesthetics in late-Victorian book design. Amber is also a reference assistant at the Lilly Library and Book Review Editor for the journal Victorian Studies. If you’d like to check out another recent project of hers, click here to explore a virtual map of nightlife in 1840s London, made using books from the Lilly’s collections!
Work Cited
Dickens, Charles. A child’s history of England / by Charles Dickens; with a frontispiece by F. W. Topham. Bradbury, London, 1852-54. Lilly Library Stacks, CN: PR4572 .C5.IUCAT
Link: https://iucat.iu.edu/catalog/18054610
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