The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens - review

Dickens was as tireless a letter-writer as there has ever been. Some 14,000 survive, addressed to 2,500 known correspondents, as well as hundreds of others not known - all gathered in the great 12-volume British Academy Pilgrim edition, published between 1965 and 2002, and regularly supplemented since in the journal The Dickensian.

Dickens himself destroyed thousands of the letters he received, professing to be "shocked by the misuse of private letters of public men". But nearly all who received letters from him treasured them from very early on in his career.

The earliest editors of his correspondence, his friend and biographer John Forster, and his daughter Mamie and sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, mangled their texts, cutting, condensing, censoring and improving as they saw fit. It was not until the Pilgrim edition that a full and reliable version, comprehensively annotated, became available. It still is available - at a price. Individual volumes are currently listed at between £189 and £198 each, meaning that assembling the set could cost over £2,000. Well worth it, of course.

Or if you're not that rich, here instead is the first selection to have been made from the Pilgrim edition, offering 450 letters for rather less. Jenny Hartley, Professor of English at Roehampton, has made her choice with the intention of displaying Dickens's range as a letter-writer and she has abbreviated the annotation so as to include as many letters as possible.

It's a thrilling, surprisingly fresh book. These letters don't just take us into the midst of Dickens's life, they are themselves exhilarating pieces of writing, one after another, so many of them wonderfully descriptive and playful, funny and noticing, in just the manner of his fiction and journalism. The sheer energy on display here seems almost superhuman. Whatever the occasion, whether it is an apparently routine rejection letter to a would-be contributor to a magazine or a request to borrow a waistcoat, or an order for clock mending, he goes forth to meet it like nobody else, thinking, feeling and saying more than could possibly be expected from anyone, let alone a man always so busy.

From Turin, writing to his wife, urging her to write a letter of reconcilation, he says: "The more you see of me, the better perhaps you may understand that the intense pursuit of any idea that takes complete possession of me, is one of the qualities that makes me different - sometimes for good; sometimes I daresay for evil - from other men." That intensity is evident on every page here. Dickens is not always right - Hartley includes the "Violated Letter" Dickens published, traducing his wife as a mother on their separation - but he is always, as he well knew, the Inimitable.

The temptation is just to quote and quote again - but that is just what, in effect, Jenny Hartley herself has done here from the mighty Pilgrim edition. Perhaps best simply recommend the book as one of the most appealing of the bicentenary? There is one serious criticism to make of it, though: to accommodate as many letters as possible, the publishers have made the type too small for easy reading in anything less than perfect light, despite its chunky 458 pages. Intended as generosity, that's a frustration. Roll on the enlargeable e-book.