Scope and arrangement
This is a synthetic collection consisting of manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence by and about the author, diaires for 1867 and 1868, notebooks for 1843 through 1870, financial and legal documents, portraits and pictorial works. There are a number of pen and ink, watercolor, and pencil drawings of illustrations for Dickens' novels by H. K. Browne, John Leech, J. C. Clarke, Frederic Pailthorpe, and George Cruikshank. The manuscripts include drafts and passages from novels, stories, poems, scenarios, captions, essays, and miscellaneous autograph material of the author, as well as essays, plays, bibliographies, lectures, and other manuscript material about the author from George Bentley, Richard Bentley, Wilkie Collins, Vladimir Nabokov, and others. The correspondence includes letters, dating from [1833] to 1870, by the author to Richard Bentley, the Reverand W. H. Brookfield, Robert Browning, George Cattermole, William F. De Cerjat, Chapman and Hall, Wilkie Collins, George Cruikshank, Peter Cunningham, his brother Frederick Dickens, George Dolby, Professor C. C. Felton, James T. Fields, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, Georgina Hogarth, Leigh Hunt, Washington Irving, Frances Maria Kelly, Walter Savage Landor, Emile de la Rue, Mark Lemon, George Henry Lewes, Charles Mackay, Daniel Maclise, Thomas Mitton, Edgar Allan Poe, David Roberts, Clarkson Stanfield, Thomas Noon Talfourd, Sir James Emerson Tennent, William Makepeace Thackeray, Frances Trollope, Thomas Adolphus Trollope, W. H. Wills, and others. Also included are letters relating to the author, dating from 1836 to [1975], between various correspondents including Alfred Ainger, Alexander Macmillan, Richard Harris Barham, George Bentley, Richard Bentley, George Cruikshank, Washington Irving, Georgina Hogarth, W. M. Rossetti, Frederic G. Kitton, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens Jr., Henry F. Dickens, and others. Present, also, are letters to Dickens from Richard Bentley, George Cruikshank, Walter Savage Landor, E. S. Morgan, A. P. Watt and Son, and others, dating from [1836?] through 1891.
The Charles Dickens collection of papers are arranged in four series: