First published in 1885, Charles Dickens As I Knew Him is a nonfiction account of Dickens’ reading tours from the perspective of his tour manager:
“All that I have done is this: I have spent some mother in the effort to tell, as simply as possible, the story of the famous Reading Tours of Charles Dickens; the most brilliantly successful of their kind that were ever undertaken. Had I the pen of a ready writer, I could have told my story a hundred times better than I have done; but such as it is, it has been a labour of love to me. Dickens was my great hero—my ‘Chief’ –in the pleasant bygone days when we were ‘on the road’ together—by day and by night, week after week, month after month, right through the English and American tours; and his memory is heroic now that he has gone. His death closed the brightest chapter of my life, and the warmth and vividness of my recollections of that period of his career in which I was privileged to be very close to him are the main explanation and excuse I have to offer for attempting to tell the story with which these pages are concerned. May I venture, in the second place, to hope that the personal references in this book, which I fear are not a few from first to last, will not be thought to have any egotistical purpose? I stood to my ‘Chief’ in the relation of manager, and it is in the managerial capacity, and in that alone, that I have introduced myself, in obedience to the necessities of the narrative.” (taken from the Preface)
- Title: Charles Dickens As I Knew Him: the story of the reading tours in Great Britain and America (1866-1870)
- Author: George Dolby
- Publisher: T Fisher Unwin
- Place: London
- Year: 1887
- Edition: Popular Edition
- Printer: Unwin Brothers, formerly the Gresham Press, Chilworth and London
- Length: 466pp
- Size: 5” x 7.75”
- Condition: This single volume Victorian era octavo, is bound in red cloth covered boards with gilt particulars on the front cover and spine. The cover is scuffed and stained from general shelf-wear and age. The spine is noticeably tanned from light exposure to the point of becoming more brown than red. There is an indentation along the edge of the back board. The binding is coming loose but is still intact. The pages of the block are clean—no extraneous marks or fold/tears, but they have become slightly brittle. There is what appears to be acid burn on the title page and corresponding page where some loose bits of paper may have been stored. The endpapers are beautifully decorated with a yellow/green printed pattern of flowers and leaves. An inscription detailing the particulars of a 1924 sale of the book and an embossed library mark are contained within the front endpapers.