The Nation Volume 99 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ...London to study the scenes of the novel, and made a conscientious effort to prepare himself for the work. To my mind it is the most readable, or the least unreadable, of the three I have seen. "An offensive fraud," writes Mr. Walters, "was, however, associated with it. No name was originally placed on the title-page, but the insidious announcement was made that the real authors were Charles Dickens's eldest son and Wilkie Collins. The lying rumor has been hard to overtake, and is still occasionally revived in spite of Collins's prompt repudiation, and Messrs. Chapman & Hall's explicit declaration in a letter to the Times...." The book was republished, within about a dozen years, bearing the imprint of a New York publisher, and unblushingly professing on its title-page to be by Charles Dickens "the Younger" and Wilkie Collins. How very respectable the operations of a burglar or a highwayman look in comparison with this kind of cheat Many persons are convinced that "Edwin Drood" was really completed by Wilkie Collins and by Dickens's son; the book is sometimes so entered in catalogues. The third continuation was the famous "Spirit Pen" volume. In this country, at any rate, the existence of such a hook is known to hundreds who have read neither it nor the genuine novel by Dickens. "The Mystery of Edwin Drood Complete. Part the Second, By the Spirit Pen of Charles Dickens, through a Medium," came from Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1875. It is one of the many painful disclosures that spirit pens are usually not only less gifted than physical ones, but are frequently not even able to write anything approaching commonsense. It must require great physical endurance to wade through the...