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xxvi |
INTRODUCTION. |
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floored: wanting sleep, and never having had my head free from it for this month past;" and two days later he said, " I dreamed all last week that the Battle of Life was a series of chambers impossible to get to rights or get out of, through which I wandered drearily all night. On Saturday night I don't think I slept an hour. I was perpetually roaming through the story. . . . The mental distress quite horrible."
On the 19th of December the book was published by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, at five shillings, uniform with its three Christmas predecessors, in a foolscap octavo volume of one hundred and seventy-five pages. It was described on the title-page as "a love story" and bore date 1846; there was no preface, but there was a dedication in the following terms :—
THIS
CHRISTMAS BOOK
IS CORDIALLY INSCRIBED TO MY ENGLISH FRIENDS
IN SWITZERLAND.
Twenty-three thousand copies of the book were disposed of on the first day, and the story, though admitted by the verdict of later years not to be one of the best of the Christmas series, achieved at the time very considerable success.
The original manuscript is in the fine collection of Mr. William Wright of Paris.
A kind of parody on the Battle of Life, called " The Battle of London Life, or Boz and his Secretary; by Morna," was published in 1849 by G. Pierce, 310 Strand. Its author was a certain Captain Thomas O'Keefe, and its prin^al claim to notice is that it contains six illustrations drawn on stone by Mr. George Augustus Sala, who also furnished the design for the back and front of the pink boards in which it was bound. Mr. Dexter refers to the book in the following terms :—
This illustrated cover contained a number of caricature portraits, amongst others those of the principal contributors to Punch—Thackeray, Jerrold, Lemon, a Beckett. The frontispiece is a portrait of Boz, sitting in his study. I have Cruikshank's copy with his autograph (it was presented to him by the author), |
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