Diagram of a slave ship
Shopping for fabric
Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'
Textiles from India
Beethoven's sketches
Exhibition of a rhino and zebra
Deciphering the Rosetta Stone
Battle of Waterloo letter
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Peterloo Massacre
Cartoon of a street accident
Shampooing Surgeon
Description of London
Execution of a 12 year old boy
Diary entry on 'The Pillory'
Invention of photography
1832 Reform Act
Tolpuddle Martyrs
Early Chartist meeting notes
Dickens, Oliver Twist
The People's Charter
Dickens: Nicholas Nickleby
Poster for Living Mermaid
The Railways
First postage stamp
Coal mining
Popular entertainments
Engels: factory conditions
Freak show: What is it?
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
The Communist Manifesto
Chartist William Cuffay
The Great Exhibition
Sketch for the Crystal Palace
Woman's magazine
Poverty and the workhouse
London Zoo
Cookery for the poor
Human Exhibition
Mary Seacole
Ship building
Britain's Indian empire
Nightingale, Notes on Nursing
Victorian fashion
Florence Nightingale letter
Coal mining
Mrs Beeton - Lady's maid
Mrs Beeton
Mrs Beeton's Turkey
A Hulk (prison ship)
Underground trains
Alice in Wonderland
Letter from Charles Darwin
City slums
Opening of the Suez Canal
Music Hall
Street sellers
Freakshow posters
Invention of the telephone
Illusionists and conjurers
The textile industry
Victorian farming
Magic show
Circus poster
Victoria's Indian servant
Match Girls Strike
Jack the Ripper murders
Daily shopping
An Asian MP in Parliament
Gladstone: Irish Home Rule
Oscar Wilde on trial
Nightingale Nurse diary
Factory accidents
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was the most popular novelist of the Victorian world, prolifically decorating themes of social reform with well-spun tales and galleries of sharply observed, well-rounded characters, such as the monstrous schoolteacher and figure of fun Wackford Squeers, in Nicholas Nickleby. This is the autograph manuscript of the opening of chapter 15. Dickens wrote the book in 19 monthly instalments from 1838 to 1839, at the same time as working on Oliver Twist and several other books and articles (perhaps necessitated by his recent marriage and rapidly growing family). It achieved the target of one of Dickens’s moral and social campaigns: cleaning up the notorious Yorkshire boarding schools, represented by Dotheboys Hall.
Shelfmark: Add. MS 57493, f.1
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