The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete

Excerpt

Such has been the rapidity of the demand for successive impressions of this book, that I have found it impossible, until now, to correct at pages 31, 87, and 97 three errors of statement made in the former editions; and some few other mistakes, not in themselves important, at pages 96, 101, and 102. I take the opportunity of adding that the mention at p. 83 is not an allusion to the well-known "Penny" and "Saturday" Magazines, but to weekly periodicals of some years' earlier date resembling them in form. One of them, I have since found from a later mention by Dickens himself, was presumably of a less wholesome and instructive character. "I used," he says, "when I was at school, to take in the Terrific Register, making myself unspeakably miserable, and frightening my very wits out of my head, for the small charge of a penny weekly; which, considering that there was an illustration to every number in which there was always a pool of blood, and at least one body, was cheap." An obliging correspondent writes to me upon my reference to the Fox-under-the-hill, at p. 62: "Will you permit me to say that the house, shut up and almost ruinous, is still to be found at the bottom of a curious and most precipitous court, the entrance of which is just past Salisbury Street. . . . It was once, I think, the approach to the halfpenny boats. The house is now shut out from the water-side by the Embankment."