Household Edition Life of Dickens | Dickens Gallery

top of page

Household Edition

Life of Charles Dickens.png

The Household Edition of The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, was published in 1879 and featured 28 illustrations by Fred Barnard.

Title Page and Vignette

If he weakly showed the least disposition to hear it, Captain Porter, in a loud sonorous voice, gave him every word of it

One of whom told us she "had no money for beggar boys'"

Jack Straw's Castle, Memorable for Many Happy Meetings in Coming Years

"It ain't a smokin' your way, Sir, I says;" he says, "No more it is, coachman, and as long as it smokes anybody else's way, it's all right and I'm agreeable"

If you could but know how I hated one man in very dirty gaiters, and with very protruding upper teeth, who said to all comers after him, "So you've been introduced to our friend Dickens — eh!"

He looked up at me; gave himself an odd, dogged kind of shake; and fixed his eyes on his book again

He is perhaps the most horrible bore in the country

Visit to a Tramps' Lodging House

Genoese Washerwomen

The Radicofani Wizard

"I say, what's French for a pillow!" "Is there any Italian phrase for a lump of sugar! Just look, will you!" "What the Devil does echo mean! The garsong says echo to everything"

Neapolitan Lazzaroni

Reading "Dombey" at the snuff shop

"I have never been able to see what they are, because one of the old ladies always sits before them; but they look, outside, like very old backgammon boards"

"Halloa, Mrs. Gamp, what are you up to!"

Off Yarmouth

Likewise an old man who ran over a milk-child rather than stop! &mdash with no neckcloth, on principle; and with his mouth wide open to catch the morning air

Bye and bye I came upon a polenta-shop in the clouds, where an old Frenchman with an umbrella like a faded tropical leaf (it had not rained in Naples for six weeks) was staring at nothing at all, with a snuff-box in his hand

"C'est vrai donc," says the Duke, "Que Madame la Duchesse n'est plus!" ... "C'est trop vrai, Monseigneur." ... "Tant mieux," says the Duke, and walks off deliberately, to the great satisfaction of the assemblage"

A Warm Corner in the Pig-Market at Boulogne

Whenever he felt Toots coming again, he began to laugh and wipe his eyes afresh; and when Toots came once more, he gave a kind of cry, as if it were too much for him

He . . . sightly cocked up his evil eye at the goldfinch. Instantly a raging thirst beset that bird; and when it appeared he still drew several unnecessary buckets of water, leaping about his perch and sharpening his bill with irrepressible satisfaction

The uneducated father in fustian and the educated boy in spectacles

Sam Weller in Sierra Nevada

bottom of page