My Early Times

This volume is a compiled autobiography of Charles Dickens's childhood and youth, assembled from fragments he wrote and from fictional passages that retell the same years. It covers Portsmouth and Chatham, the family's money troubles, the blacking warehouse off the Strand, Wellington House Academy, a solicitor's office, and the turn to reporting and Sketches. Letters and later prefaces supply what the abandoned 1840s memoir left unfinished. The editor's method is to let Dickens's own prose, including David Copperfield material used as testimony, form a continuous early life. The book is a reconstructed childhood narrative, not a new novel and not a full biography.

Quarter-bound in red cloth with cream vegetable parchment decorated covers. Red slipcase. Cream paper wrap-around band with hand written salutation. The Presentation Volume for 1989.