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This article originates from the Dickens Seminar, traditionally a feature of the biennial ESSE-European Society for the Study of English-Conference, which was held in 2022 at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. The Dickens Seminar, jointly chaired by Matthias Bauer, Angelika Zirker (both Tubingen University), and Nathalie Vanfasse (Aix-Marseille University) focused on \"Dickens and / in Colour.\" Hence the notion of chromophobia deployed in this article, a notion applied to a Dickensian text in which colour and its uses play a paramount role of remarkable importance. The text is American Notes: For General Circulation (1842), generally considered a travelogue, an account of Charles Dickens's experiences when travelling across the United States. As a travelogue, American Notes should obey the laws of descriptive realism, but a close analysis of the text suggests that Dickens places a special emphasis on the use of colour which tends to create descriptive effects that bypass the accuracy of realistic description. Colours in the United States are either heightened to a maximum degree of saturation, or diluted to a wholly discoloured state. The transition between colour and non-colour is best described by David Batchelor in his study of chromophobia, a notion which illuminates the discursive meanings embedded in the Dickensian text, helping unveil his strategy of conveying disappointment and disgust for things American.

[...]the first translations of the sketches emerged in the context of an already celebrated Pickwick. Boz strolls through the secluded premises of the ecclesiastical courts of London, where Dickens had worked as a shorthand reporter, and which Steerforth later describes as: a little out-of-the-way place, where they administer what is called ecclesiastical law, and play all kinds of tricks with obsolete old monsters of acts of Parliament, which three-fourths of the world know nothing about, and the other fourth supposes to have been dug up, in a fossil state, in the days of the Edwards. Boz describes the defendant, so sentenced and also fined, as outraging the court by remarking that 'if they'd be good enough to take off the costs, and excommunicate him for the term of his natural life instead, it would be much more convenient to him, for he never went to church at all'.21 Boz's sketch was translated (and had been written) at a time of tension between Catholic and Protestant communities in Britain and Ireland. The power of Catholic clergy to excommunicate non-adherents was cited by some as consistent with Catholic militancy, and, by extension, hostility to a Protestant-based British constitution.22 Given this sombre background, Dickens may have thought his protagonist's willing acceptance of exclusion from an activity he had no intention of pursuing particularly amusing.

\"4 Its cosily traditionalist content made it a favorite performance item at Conservative socio-political gatherings.5 Dickens's version subverted its sentiment: the second and the last of its eight verses provide a flavor: The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips, and chains, With fine old English penalties, and fine old English pains, With rebel heads, and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins; For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains Of the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, In England there shall be dear bread—in Ireland, sword and brand; And poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, So, rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, Of the fine old English Tory days; Hail to the coming time![6] And, no doubt remembering his long night among the City of London Conservatives five years earlier, Dickens appended to the title \" To be said or sung at all Conservative Dinners.\"

Thack.'s [Thackeray's] eyes sparkled through his spectacles as he spoke of it yesterday.14 George Eliot told Blackwood on 18 February that, his own appreciation of the story aside, 'that little fact about Albert Smith has gratified me more than anything else in connection with the effect of \"Amos\"'.15 His enthusiasm at this early stage had such significance for her that ten months later she recorded in 'How I Came to Write Fiction' (an account she entered in her Diary on 6 December 1857 - that is, a month before the publication of Scenes in book form) the details of Blackwood's report of what Smith had written.16 Naturally, Smith was also sent a presentation copy of the book. The pleasure Smith's words gave her was not quite so intense as the effect of Dickens's more delicately expressed and more perspicacious 'professional' letter, but the Garrick context of Smith's evokes the male Club community which included Dickens. The selfish young fellow with the heart disease, in 'Mr Gilfil's Love-Story,' is plainly taken from a woman's point of view. [...]I have not the faintest doubt that a woman described her being shut out into the street by her husband, and conceived and executed the whole idea of her following of that clergyman. Dickens was of course sent a copy,18 but he delayed writing to her until 10 July, by which time he was editing and publishing All the Year Round, the magazine which 'arose from the ashes of Household Words and the incendiary row in Dickens's private life'.19 However, on 28 April he had instructed his 'sub Editor and business right hand',20 W.H. Wills, to write to her 'care of Blackwood - with a private seal on the [...] letter'21 inviting her to write for the new magazine, but had only now received ('in confidence') her response, in which she had evidently alluded to her domestic circumstances.

What is to become of me, I do not know; but I find it to be an ill sign that my courage is leaving me - What Lord Strafford said-\"fi a faute de courage, Je n'en ai que trop\"1- I have often in a small way said to myself; but shall not be asking, alas, to say it any more- How much to believe of what I see in the newspaper I do not know either; but I did not need to know that whatever unearthly influence might move our strange government to volunteer a worthy offer to you, it would be met by a worthier and nobler non placet.2 Adieu, dear Carlyle. Envelope: Addr: Thomas Carlyle Esq / John Forster Stationery: 193, Piccadilly, London, W. Enclosures: along with Chapman's letter, JF encloses newspaper cutting pasted in, \"NEW WORKS by THOMAS CARLYLE:- The early kings of norway in fraser's magazine for January, February, and March, 1875. [...]edition, price 2s. The house is on too big a scale for my notions of comfort and home-too large, before the fire,11 I should say, for any but the most ducal fortune; and of course, since the fire, which left only this wing we inhabit, the splendid gardens and passages, as well as the rooms themselves, are of disproportioned size.

This paper considers the reconstruction by John Forster of Charles Dickens’s childhood through his use of what is usually called ‘the autobiographical fragment’, a short text dealing with the Blacking Warehouse episode which bears witness to both Dickens’s strict auto-censorship and his tendency to frenetic confession. That a revelation of intimate details might endanger the ‘national treasure’ that Dickens had become at the end of the forties (the phrase is borrowed from Jean Ferguson Carr) seems a good enough reason for Dickens to have abandoned the idea of writing his autobiography and to have given the piece to Forster. This paper first shows how Forster dealt with the fragment, its blanks, omissions and almost impressionistic structure in short scenes before revealing in his biography that the draft could be found almost verbatim in David Copperfield. Further, when it comes to the fragment, Dickens’s complex managerial stratagem proves to be an integral element in the reconstruction of his childhood experience. The question of authority is of course central, Dickens’s apparent lack of interest in the future publication of his text seeming particularly out of character in the light of the control he most certainly exerted over his friends, and more specifically his future biographer.

(7; bk. 1, ch. 1 and 205 fn; bk. 3, ch. 2) Dickens responded to Giles in an undated letter, sending a copy of the onevolume Pickwick Papers (published November 1837), and regretting that Oliver Twistwzs not yet in volume form: (it was to appear so in November 1838) (Letters 1: 429). [...]Dickens's reference to Oliver Twist in his response; the substance of the inscription, which alludes to Dickens's \"devotion [...] to [...] the melioration of the condition of the distressed;\" and the particular admiration Giles later expressed for the workhouse sequences of Oliver (Long, passim) all suggest that Giles wrote after reading at least the opening chapters of that serial (which appeared in February 1837). The second frequently mentioned early use of \"inimitable\" occurs in Dickens's editorial response in the February 1837 number of Bentleys Miscellany to a potential contributor: \"The person who addressed to the Publisher a manuscript [...] with a request that it might receive a few touches from the inimitable Boz', is an impudent imposter These two usages of \"inimitable,\" although notable, were not the earliest occasions on which the epithet appeared in connection with Boz and his works.

(1812–76), was editor of Foreign Quarterly Review, 1842–3, the Daily News, 1846, and the