Charley and Bessie: An Aside
Reference assistant Amber Bowes showcases the fascinating history of a Charles Dickens work– including a star-crossed love story– in this exciting second installation of a two-part blog post!
In my first blog post about this book, which you can read here (Triple-deckers and Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England (Part 1) | IU Libraries Blogs), we considered A Child’s History’s “triple-decker” format and the marks of readership its three volumes contain. The Lilly’s copy of this book wasn’t only owned and valued by Victorian circulating libraries, families, or schools, however. The project, like all of Dickens’s work, quickly became collectible, though Dickens himself didn’t seem to have such lofty expectations for the project–or else he acted on false modesty when he dedicated the work “To my own dear children, whom I hope it may help, bye-and-bye, to read with interest larger and better books on the same subject.”
Though little evidence exists of the project’s effect on his children’s reading habits, in one other respect, the creation and moderate success of this project was something that changed the life of Charley Dickens, Charles’ son, forever. A Child’s History of England was published in its triple-decker format by Bradbury and Evans in London, a printing firm (est. 1830) turned publishing company which had purchased Dickens’s popular serial Punch in 1841 and which he, somewhat reluctantly, turned to as a publisher for some of his other works, including his Child’s History. Neither Bradbury nor Evans upheld the cleanest professional reputation; George Shillingsburg calls their publishing career “extraordinarily lucky rather than expert or self-assured” (74), and indeed, Bradbury and Evans eventually ran out of luck, breaking off from Dickens and, in a fit of pique, printing their own magazine to compete with Punch. Publisher and author never reconciled, but an unexpected legacy resulted from their short partnership: Frederick Evans’ daughter Bessie would go on to marry Charles Dickens’s eldest son Charley in 1861.
In the image above, taken in 1857, all are grouped together in a large gathering of friends, with Charles seated sideways in front of the group and Charley and Bessie seated together, to the left of Charles. Four years later, Charles would refuse to attend his son’s wedding due to his rivalry with Bradbury and Evans. Charley and Bessie would go through with their marriage regardless of Dickens’s disapproval and have eight children together, including late-Victorian novelist and journalist Mary Angela “Mekitty” Dickens (Loughlin-Chow). If Charles had never made the questionable business decision to go into work with the Evans, Charley and Bessie’s star-crossed (or printing-press-crossed, rather) marriage might never have taken place.
Life after Printing: The History’s Journey to the Lilly
Though this edition certainly began its life in the irresponsible hands of Bradbury and Evans, its story becomes murkier somewhere along its road to the Lilly Library. A sticker in Volume III of the set identifies it as being sold by a “W. & E. Pickering” bookseller in Bath. I believe this sticker may refer to William Pickering, a famous publisher, seller, and collector of books in the nineteenth century, who early in his publishing career was “responsible for the introduction of the cloth-bound book” (Warrington 247). Pickering worked with famous authors of the time and favored cloth bindings, so, though he didn’t publish Dickens’s History directly, he might have taken an interest in it as a collector and salesman.
Pickering had a connection to Bath in the form of a close friend and associate, Rev. Joseph Hunter, a minister who worked in Bath in literary and historical research for most of his life. Pickering also tended “to become preoccupied with elaborate extravagant books such as Henry Drummond’s Histories of Noble British Families” (Warrington 261). Born illegitimate to a “book-loving earl,” and raised by a tailor’s wife, Pickering found his way back to books through trade. This history means there is even something poetic about the possibility that a fine Dickens edition, like this one, passed through Pickering’s hands. Pickering built a career and a reputation out of his fascination for fine books, and–like a flawed and ambitious Dickensian lead–ultimately lost his wealth when he could not adapt to mass-market tastes, dying bankrupt in 1853 (Warrington 247).
Whether the sticker comes from this famous bookseller or from a separate family of sellers, it only marks one edition of the three-volume work. Either the seller, owning the full set, only felt the need to mark one, or the set has been separated at some point during its lifespan. If the volumes were ever separated from one another, however, they were reunited in a complete set under the watch of Josiah Kirby Lilly, whose collections, including A Child’s History, were donated and formed the basis of the Lilly Library in 1960. Lilly’s signature coin sticker marks all three volumes in the set, meaning that this work was a part of his personal collection before it came to the library. Heir to the pharmaceutical wealth of his family, Lilly was a voracious and eclectic collector, and this Dickens edition was only one item among so many—his donations spanned over 20,000 books and nearly as many manuscripts.
Now that A Child’s History of England is at the Lilly Library, this edition has found its forever home, where new Lilly workers and visitors will read, examine, and hear the book’s story again and again. We are lucky, today, to have the opportunity to remember books like A Child’s History, and to spend time decoding their possible past lives. As Katherine Stein wrote in her description of the book for The Literary Encyclopedia in 2024, “ultimately, Dickens’s History is a quintessentially Victorian text that communicates more about the Victorians and their foibles than it does the history that it presents to children” (Stein). Through its bookseller’s stickers and collector’s stamps, its annotations and scribbles, even in the petty drama of its publishers and author, this edition of A Children’s History offers its modern readers a tactile glimpse into the daily patterns, business, and intricacies of family life for the Victorians. Interacting with a book like this—regardless of the book’s silly, underwhelming, or just flat-out incorrect content—is to understand, in one way, what life felt like for people who are no longer here to tell us in person.
Anyone interested in A Child’s History of England can read a scan of all three volumes online at Gale Primary Sources. If you’d like to see and touch the edition pictured in this blog post, make an appointment at least one week in advance to visit the Lilly Library’s reading room by emailing liblilly@iu.edu.
About the author: Amber Bowes is a PhD candidate 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!
Works 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
Dickens, Charles, and Bradbury & Evans. A Child’s History of England: by Charles Dickens; with a Frontispiece by F. W. Topham. Illustrated by Francis William Topham, vol. 1, Bradbury & Evans, 1853. Nineteenth Century Collections Online. [Vol. 2 & 3 available through same host, under “Related Volumes”]
Loughlin-Chow, M. Clare. “Dickens, Charles Culliford Boz [Charley] (1837–1896), magazine editor and compiler of guidebooks.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 23, 2004.
Shillingsburg, Peter L. “The Writer as a Literary Property,” Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray, University Press of Virginia, 1992, pp. 74-85.
Stein, Katherine. “A Child’s History of England”. The Literary Encyclopedia. ed. Grace Moore, July 13, 2023.
Unknown photographer. “Group including Clarkson Stanfield, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Augustus Leopold Egg.” National Portrait Gallery, 1857, Given by Alfred Jones, 1924.
Warrington, Bernard. “William Pickering and the book trade in the early nineteenth century.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 68.1, 1985, pp. 247-266, https://doi.org/10.7227/BJRL.68.1.11.
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