University of Buckingham Professor helps to solve mystery of unidentified Victorian authors

13 July 2015

The authors of thousands of articles, short stories and poems, printed anonymously in a literary magazine edited by Charles Dickens, have been revealed after an antiquarian book dealer discovered a bound collection of the periodicals annotated by Dickens.

Among the biggest revelations are works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Lewis Carroll and Dickens’ close friend Wilkie Collins, as well as two articles co-written by Dickens, which were previously thought to have been written by others.

In a secret meeting in London, before the find was announced, Dr Jeremy Parrott, an academic and book dealer, showed three of the volumes to leading Victorian experts Professor John Drew, Dean of Humanities at The University of Buckingham, Michael Slater and Paul Lewis, to help gauge their veracity.

The find gives an insight into Dickens’ nepotism, showing that he used his weekly magazine All the Year Round to publish three articles of dubious quality by his teenage sons, Frank and Sydney.

Dr Parrott, ordered a 20-volume bound collection of All the Year Round from an online bookseller in Wrexham. When Dr Parrott opened them he found, to his surprise, they were annotated by Dickens.

The discovery solves the mystery of which Victorian writers were commissioned by Dickens and identifies new works by many leading authors. Dickens’ notes mean that between 300 and 400 authors have been identified as responsible for some 2,500 contributions.

All The Year Round was a weekly literary journal published between 1859 and 1895 containing articles, serialised novels, short stories and poems by leading Victorian writers.

Professor Drew, who has spent much of the past decade putting the entire archive of writing from Dickens’ periodicals online, and trying to identify the authors, said he was “extremely excited” at the find. He said: “He was a very hands-on editor who made fairly free with his pen.”

The bound collection had been owned by the Duttons, a wealthy North Wales family, since the 1920s before being bought by the Wrexham book seller last year.