Drood

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to acknowledge the help and editing excellence of Reagan Arthur, executive editor at Little, Brown, as well as the truly extraordinary work of senior copyeditor Betsy Uhrig. I’m sure there still will be infelicities and errors in this novel, but in almost all cases, the fault will have been mine. (If stubbornness were a virtue, I’d have one foot in Heaven.)

Only a partial list of the biographical and other sources related to Charles Dickens and his era which I consulted is possible here, but the author would especially like to acknowledge the following—

Dickens by Peter Ackroyd, © 1990, pub. by HarperCollins; Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumphs by Edgar Johnson, © 1952, pub. by Simon and Schuster; Dickens: A Biography by Fred Kaplan, © 1988, pub. by The Johns Hopkins University Press; Charles Dickens As I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America (1866–1870) by George Dolby, © 1887, pub. in Popular Edition by T. Fisher Unwin, London; Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley, © 2002, pub. by Penguin Putnam Inc.; The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens edited by John O. Jordan, © 2001, pub. by Cambridge University Press; Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, © 1874; The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, © 1870 by Household Words, Oxford University Press Edition © 1956.

Some other sources for Dickens and his era which the author would like to acknowledge include—

Dickens and His Family by W. H. Bowen, © 1956; The Life of Charles Dickens as Revealed in His Writing by Percy Fitzgerald, © 1905; The Changing World of Charles Dickens edited by R. Giddings, © 1983; Victorian People and Ideas by Richard D. Altick, © 1973; The World of Charles Dickens (A Pitkin Guide) by Michael St. John Parker, © 2005; Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 by David L. Pike, © 2005; Dickens and Daughter by Gladys Storey, © 1939; Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists by W. C. Phillips, © 1919; London 1808–1870: The Infernal Wen by Francis Sheppard, © 1971; Charles Dickens, Resurrectionist by Andrew Sanders, © 1982; The Speeches of Charles Dickens edited by K. J. Fielding, © 1950; The Actor in Dickens by J. B. van Amerongen, © 1926; Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter, © 1968; Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction by Fred Kaplan, © 1988; The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America by Nigel Cliff, © 2007.

Internet sources relating to Dickens and his world are too numerous to list in full, but a few that the author especially wishes to acknowledge are—

“Inspector Charles Frederick Field” at www.ric.edu/rpotter/chasfield.html; “Victorian London—District—Streets—Bluegate Fields” at www.victorianlondon.org/districts/bluegate.html; “Dickens’ London” at www.fidnest.com/~dap.1955/dickens/dickens_london_map.html; “Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens” at www.classicbookshelf.com/library/charles_dickens/reprinted_pieces/19/html; “Housing and Health (Deaths from cholera in Broad Street, Golden Square, London, and the neighbourhood, 19 August to 30 September, 1854)” at www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~city19/viccity/househealth.html; “Beetles as Religious Symbols, Cultural Entomology, Digest 2” at www.insectos.org/ced2beetles_rel_sym.html; “Modern Egyptian Ritual Magick: Ceremony of Blessing and Naming a New Child” at www.idolhands.com/egypt/netra/naming.html.

For insight into Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, the author wishes to acknowledge the amazing lecture on that novel given at Wellesley College by Vladimir Nabokov (even though Nabokov led the author astray on one central word in a powerful quotation, an error completely missed by the author—who’d just finished rereading Bleak House—but caught by the inimitable copyeditor Betsy Uhrig). That lecture is collected in Lectures on Literature edited by Fredson Bowers, © 1980, pub. by Harcourt, Inc.

The author wishes to acknowledge the following sources in his research on Wilkie Collins—

The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William Clarke, © 1988, pub. by Sutton Publishing Limited; The Public Face of Wilkie Collins: The Collected Letters, Volumes I–IV edited by William Baker, Andrew Gasson, Graham Law, Paul Lewis, © 2005, pub. by Pickering & Chatto; The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins by Catherine Peters, © 1991, pub. by Martin Secker & Warburg; Wilkie Collins: A Biography by Kenneth Robinson, © 1952, pub. by the MacMillan Company; Some Recollections of Yesterday by Nathaniel Beard, © 1894, pub. in Temple Bar, Vol. CII; Memories of Half a Century by R. C. Lehmann, © 1908, pub. by Smith Elder; The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, first published in Temple Bar © 1874, Hesperus Classics edition pub. by Hesperus Press Limited.

For those interested in Wilkie Collins, the author recommends one especially helpful Web site—“Wilkie Collins Chronology” at www.-wilkie-collins.info/wilkie_collins_chronology.html .

Finally, and always, my deepest thanks and dearest love to my first reader, primary proofreader, and ultimate source of inspiration—Karen Simmons.