The British Academy/The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume 11: 1865-1867

This eleventh volume presents 1158 letters, many previously unpublished or published only in part. Dickens's main work in the period is the completion of the monthly parts of Our Mutual Friend; unusually, it comes out in two volumes (January and November 1865) during the period of its run. The three All the Year Round Christmas numbers, `Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions', `Mugby Junction', and `No Thoroughfare' (written jointly with Wilkie Collins) are again highly successful. The most dramatic event in this volume is the railway accident at Staplehurst, Kent, on 9 June 1865, in which he is involved on returning from France, accompanied by Ellen Ternan and her mother. He gives two provincial reading tours, in 1866 and 1867, besides frequent readings in London, and on 9 November 1867 sails from Liverpool to Boston, to begin his American reading tour.