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Dickens probably wrote the following portions of 'Christmas in the Frozen Regions': from the opening to 'FRANKLIN'S name' (p. 307); from 'From that solitude' (p. 308) to the conclusion.
Dickens seems also to have gone over other sections of the essay and to have made occasional emendations. For example, the paragraph beginning 'Thus ended our Christmas holidays' (p. 308) reads as though it had been touched here and there by Dickens.
Dickens was fascinated by the 'frozen regions' and this fascination often enters his writings. He once contemplated setting a novel in a solitude of ice and snow, and for a while the idea of living in such a fastness obsessed him. In this edition his interest in such regions is best exemplified by this essay and by 'The Lost Arctic Voyagers.'
The Contributors' Book indicates that 'Christmas in the Frozen Regions' was written by Dickens and 'Dr. Cormack.' It is clear, however, that 'Dr. Cormack' should be Dr. Robert McCormick (1800-1890). McCormick was surgeon aboard the Erebus during Sir James Clark Ross's antarctic expedition of 1839-1843, the expedition described in the article. In 1884, McCormick published Voyages of Discovery in the Arctic and Antarctic Seas, and Round the World, a two-volume work based upon his journals. At the end of this work he included a long 'Autobiography,' also based, in part, upon his journals. In the latter work, under the entry 4 December 1850, he wrote: 'Having written an article on 'Christmas Day at the South Pole,' which my friend [Frederick Knight] Hunt, the editor of the Daily News, asked me for, as a contribution to the Christmas number of Household Words, for Charles Dickens, I took it to him, when it was at once sent to press, and appeared in that number.'
McCormick's journals, as quoted in Voyages of Discovery, confirm the details given in 'Christmas in the Frozen Regions.' When the Erebus left New Zealand in November, its decks were crowded with oxen, sheep, goats, pigs, and poultry. By the end of December, these provisions were largely depleted, but an ox and a goose remained for Christmas dinner. McCormick's entry for 25 December 1841 reads in part: 'Although surrounded by ice, and having been some time at sea, we managed to provide a very fair dinner on the occasion, roast goose and plenty of fresh meat.' Christmas day had begun dark and gloomy, but in the afternoon the weather cleared and the Erebus saw its sister ship, the Terror. 'The Terror appeared beset behind a most remarkable berg, having two cupola-shaped hummocks on its summit, which we christened the 'Christmas berg.' I took two sketches of it, giving one to Captain Ross'. The subsequent account of Christmas and New Year's also, follows McCormick's journals.
'Christmas in the Frozen Regions' appeared in a regular issue of Household Words, an issue denominated 'The Christmas Number.' The issue began with 'A Christmas Tree' by Dickens and continued with pieces such as 'Christmas in Lodgings,' 'Christmas Among the London Poor and Sick,' and 'Christmas in India.' The article immediately following 'Christmas in the Frozen Regions' was an antipodal piece entitled 'Christmas Day in the Bush'; it opened with a 'burning Christmas eve' and went on to describe a torrid Christmas day spent in the 'burning sun.' It seems clear from this and from McCormick's remarks in his 'Autobiography' that Dickens sought out 'Christmas in the Frozen Regions' as part of a calculated contrast; it also seems clear that he renamed the article and added the sections not based upon McCormick's journals (see attributions in first paragraph above). The 21 December 1850 issue of Household Words was the only regular Christmas number of the magazine. In 1851, Dickens inaugurated the extra Christmas numbers of Household Words. See headnote to The Seven Poor Travellers.

Harry Stone; © Bloomington and Indiana University Press, 1968. DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

Dickens probably wrote the following portions of 'Mr. Bendigo Buster on Our National Defences Against Education': from 'Whereas, go into any' to 'I call it Prussian' (p. 314); the paragraph beginning 'Here's a pretty coil' (p. 317); the paragraph beginning 'It is the same' (p. 318).
Dickens may also have retouched or added to the following sections: from the opening to 'with a will' (p. 313); from 'but I consider pauperism' to 'knock 'em down' (p. 314); from 'What I say of a boy' to 'that's the jockey to manage children!' (p. 315); the paragraph beginning 'That's the machine' (p. 316); from 'I say no more' (p. 318) to the conclusion.
In addition, Dickens seems to have emended many other passages.
Of this piece Dickens wrote to Wills on 12 December 1850: 'This proof of Morley's, when corrected, will require to be very carefully looked to. I had better go over it myself. I can't make out whether he means Mr. Buster to be actually a prize-fighter, or a person in the position of a gentleman with prizefighting tastes. I have adopted the latter hypothesis, as involving less inconsistency and incongruity.' It is not clear whether Dickens had already made alterations in the article and wished new proof, or whether he was referring to revisions he contemplated making. In any case, a subsequent letter to Wills written that afternoon seems to indicate that he reworked the article later that day. The second letter [...] now in the Huntington Library, states that he was sending the altered paper directly on to Wills' home.
'Bendigo' was the nickname of William Thompson, a famous pugilist who achieved his most notable victories in 1850.

Harry Stone; © Bloomington and Indiana University Press, 1968. DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

Mostly from Joseph Kay, The Social Condition and Education of the People in England and Europe (1850).

See also 'Mr. Bendigo Buster on the Model Cottages', Household Words, III, No. 67.

In this piece Dickens seizes the opportunity both to mock political sloganeering in general and to remind his readers of particular scandals of the previous year. The Old Year's words, 'I have been a Year of Ruin...I have been a Year of Commercial Prosperity' look forward to the famous opening of A Tale of Two Cities [AYR, Vol. I, 30 April] (1859): 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....' Turning to particularities, Dickens mocks the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers (est. 1847), which had decreed the abolition of all cesspits with the catastrophic result that London's sewage was now discharged direct into the Thames. The Commissioners were able to resist the General Board of Health's plans (drawn up by Edwin Chadwick) for a total reorganisation of London's water-supply and drainage system because the metropolis was specifically excluded from the Board's remit.

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Dickens is here responding, as he makes clear, to a report in The Times of 27 December (p. 5, cols 5–6) of a meeting of the engine-drivers and firemen of the southern division of the London and North Western Railway, held at the Railway Tavern, Hampstead Road, on 26 December. The meeting was to hear delegates from the northern division and to decide whether to support them in threatening to strike. Delegates from the Great Western and other lines also attended. The northern men's grievances seem to have centred around the Company's decision to require three months' notice from employees wishing to leave its service. Simpson, a GWR driver, counselled caution and compromise: 'The more strikes there are the worse for ourselves, for we always find a certain set of men who have no character while things are straight, but who are taken on to supply the places of honest men if a strike occurs.'

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Compiled in large part from Thomas Keightley, The History of England, and from George L. Craik and Charles MacFarlane, The Pictorial History of England.

Dickens probably wrote the following portions of 'Plate Glass': from 'Tracking our guide' to 'this country' (p. 434); from 'Having, by this time' to 'so radiant and so strong' (p. 434); from 'It was a sight' to 'dreamers in the world!' (p. 435); from 'The kitchen' to 'brought from the furnaces' (p. 436); from 'Thanking the courteous gentleman' (p. 437) to the conclusion.
Dickens may also have added substantially to the following sections: from the beginning to 'found out by accident?' (p. 433); from 'The first ingredient' to 'attempted to register' (p. 434); from 'Mr. Bossle expressed' (p. 434) to 'hall of furnaces' (p. 435); from 'This art is practised' to 'most gigantic of known Rubrics' (p. 437).
In addition, Dickens seems to have added touches throughout the article. For a discussion of the Dickens-Wills attributions, see note to 'Valentine's Day at the Post-Office.'
On 14 December 1850, Dickens wrote Wills as follows regarding their plans to visit the Thames Plate Glass Company: 'I forgot to tell you yesterday that Egg proposes to meet us at the Blackwall Railway at 3 on Monday [16 December] to go down (by appointment with the Proprietors) to those Plate Glass Works. He says the visit will occupy some three hours. Therefore our friend H. W. [Household Words] must improvise a city dinner afterwards. I shall be at the office on Monday, between 12 and 1.'
It seems likely that the opening of 'Plate Glass' and some of the details contained in the piece were suggested by 'A Day at a Flint-Glass Factory,' an article in Charles Knight's Penny Magazine, New Series (1841). Some of the technical descriptions in 'Plate Glass' follow the descriptions in the Penny Magazine, and the central feature of the introduction to 'Plate Glass' - the long quotation from Dr. Johnson - also forms the opening of the 'Flint-Glass Factory.' It seems reasonable to suppose that in the course of writing the article, Dickens or Wills consulted the Penny Magazine.

Harry Stone; © Bloomington and Indiana University Press, 1968. DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

In the midwife or monthly nurse sketched here Dickens presents, as T. W. Hill observes (unpub. notes to Reprinted Pieces [1858], Dickens House), 'a more respectable Mrs Gamp'. Alone among European countries, England had no regulations regarding the practice of midwifery (this remained the case until 1902): 'Any person, however ignorant and untrained, could describe herself as a midwife and practise for gain' (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edn, s.v. 'midwife'). The custom of 'swaddling' new-born infants, wrapping them up in narrow lengths of bandage to prevent free movement of the limbs, had been condemned as far back as 1826 (see W. P. Dewees's Physical and Medical Treatment of Children [1826], cited in OED, s.v. 'swaddling'), but persisted far into Victorian times. The phrase 'the brushes of All Nations' is a playful allusion to the coming Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations (opened 1 May 1851). 

Author: Michael Slater; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume II: 'The Amusements of the People' and Other Papers: Reports, Essays and Reviews, 1834-51 (1996). DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

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Compiled in large part from Thomas Keightley, The History of England, and from George L. Craik and Charles MacFarlane, The Pictorial History of England.

Dickens here continues his vigorous support of the public pressure on the City of London's governing body, the Court of Common Council, to accept the 1849 Royal Commission on Smithfield's recommendation that the market be relocated in a less central and densely populated part of London. The Council's extreme reluctance to adopt this course was hardly surprising given that the City was, according to A. Forshaw and T. Bergström (Smithfield Past and Present, 2nd edn, [1990], p. 57) raking in a net profit of almost £10,000 a year from tolls imposed on Smithfield traders (one old penny per head per beast and one shilling per score of sheep – W. Thornbury, Old and New London [6 vols, 1879–85], Vol. 2 [n. d.], p. 350).

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Though the initial version of 'My Mahogany Friend' was by Mary Boyle, the published version was thoroughly reworked by Dickens. In a letter to Miss Boyle dated 21 February 1851, Dickens apologized for heavily editing and rewriting the piece:

I have devoted a couple of hours this evening to going very carefully over your paper (which I had read before) and to endeavouring to bring it closer, and to lighten it, and to give it that sort of compactness which a habit of composition, and of disciplining one's thoughts like a regiment, and of studying the art of putting each soldier into his right place, may have gradually taught me to think necessary. I hope, when you see it in print, you will not be alarmed by my use of the pruning-knife. I have tried to exercise it with the utmost delicacy and discretion, and to suggest to you, especially towards the end, how this sort of writing (regard being had to the size of the journal in which it appears) requires to be compressed, and is made pleasanter by compression. This all reads very solemnly, but only because I want you to read it (I mean the article) with as loving an eye as I have truly tried to touch it with a loving and gentle hand. I propose to call it 'My Mahogany Friend!' The other name is too long, and I think not attractive. I think there are many things in it that are very pretty. The Katie part is particularly well done.

Dickens' revisions, though mostly editorial, seem ubiquitous and transforming - a contribution acknowledged in the Contributors' Book by his designation as joint author.

Harry Stone; © Bloomington and Indiana University Press, 1968. DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

'External paper-hanging', or the pasting up of advertising posters on every available square foot of space on walls, fences, hoardings, etc., reached epidemic proportions during the 1830s and 1840s, one of the things that encouraged the practice being the exemption of such posters from the tax levied on newspaper advertisements. Advertising vans, parading the streets at a walking pace, constituted a major nuisance to other traffic. W. Weir, writing a chapter on 'Advertisements' in Vol. 5 (1843) of Charles Knight's London (1841–4), comments:

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Dickens probably wrote the following portions of 'Spitalfields': from 'And what strange streets' (p. 27) to 'in the streets' (p. 29); from 'We knock at the door' (p. 30) to the conclusion.
Dickens may also have added substantially to the following sections: from the beginning to 'come to Spitalfields?' (p. 25); from 'Along a narrow passage' to 'money of Great Britain' (p. 25).
In addition, Dickens seems to have added many telling touches to passages primarily by Wills. For a discussion of the Dickens-Wills attributions, see note to 'Valentine's Day at the Post-Office.'
Spitalfields, as the article relates, was a portion of London resettled in the seventeenth century by French Huguenot weavers. These men had made the district a center of home silk weaving - a method of manufacture that had latterly become outmoded and uneconomic. Writing with subdued force and symbolic richness, Dickens, in his chief contribution to the piece (pp. 27-29), describes the weaver and his task, juxtaposes traditional ways with the thunderous rush of industrialization, and limns a stark picture of a doomed man at his doomed work.

Harry Stone; © Bloomington and Indiana University Press, 1968. DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

Dickens probably wrote the following portion of 'Chips: Small Beginnings': from 'But our readers' (p. 41) to the conclusion.
The institution referred to below was the Westminster Ragged Dormitory, the program of which was described in the Household Words article, 'The Power of Small Beginnings' (20 July 1850), by W. H. Wills. The Westminster Ragged Dormitory took derelict boys from Ragged Schools, prisons, and streets, housed and trained them for a period, and then financed their emigration to the United States or Australia. The following 'Chip' gives an account of how some of the emigrants fared after they arrived in their new homes. The 'Chip' concludes with a characteristic comment by Dickens.

Harry Stone; © Bloomington and Indiana University Press, 1968. DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

Dickens probably wrote the following portions of 'The Metropolitan Protectives': from 'There are six hundred' (p. 100) to 'do nothing' (p. 101); from 'We fall into a doze' (p. 101) to 'in the morning' (p. 103); from 'We have not' (p. 104) to 'the Bill of Rights?' (p. 105); from 'Believe us' (p. 105) to the conclusion.
Dickens may also have added to the following sections: from the opening to 'no such distrust' (p. 97); from 'No other door' to 'with defiance' (p. 99); from 'O! Please sir' (p. 103) to 'very source of crime' (p. 104).
In addition, Dickens seems to have gone over other sections of the essay with great care and to have made many emendations. For a discussion of the Dickens-Wills attributions, see note to 'Valentine's Day at the Post-Office.'
Dickens set forth his original idea for 'The Metropolitan Protectives' in a letter to Wills (3 April 1851):

I thought of something for to-night, that I think will make a splendid paper ... This is it; A Night in a Station-House. If you would go down to our friend Mr. Yardley, at Scotland Yard, and get a letter or order to the acting chief authority at that station-house in Bow Street, to enable us to hear the charges, observe the internal economy of the station-house all night, go round to the cells with the visiting policeman, etc., I would stay there, say from twelve to-night to four or five in the morning. We might have a 'night-cap,' a fire, and some tea at the office hard by. If you could conveniently borrow an hour or two from the night we could both go. If not, I would go alone. It would make a wonderful good paper at a most appropriate time, when the back slums of London are going to be invaded by all sorts of strangers.
You needn't exactly say that I was going in propria (unless it were necessary), and, of course, you wouldn't say that I propose to-night, because I am so worn by the sad arrangements in which I am engaged, and by what led to them, that I cannot take my natural rest [his father had died on 31 March]. But to-morrow night we go to the gas-works. I might not be so disposed for this station-house observation as I shall be to-night for a long time, and I see a most singular and admirable chance for us in the descriptive way, not to be lost.
Therefore, if you will arrange the thing before I come down [to the Household Words office] at four this afternoon, any of the Scotland Yard people will do it, I should think; if our friend by any accident should not be there, I will go into it.
If they should recommend any other station house as better for the purpose, or would think it better for us to go to more than one under the guidance of some trustworthy man, of course we will pay any man and do as they recommend. But I think one topping station-house would be best.

In a letter to Wills dated 13 April 1851, Dickens writes: 'I enclose you the Police Article. I have cut down the number of cases, to save tediousness. Two drunken men, for example, could scarcely have been done with. It occurs to me that I have not described the cells. But I had better 'put in that,' and any other line or so that occurs to me, when I get the proof. For the present slips [pages of manuscript] are horribly mauled. I have done all I could - sat at it nine hours without stirring - and hope it will come out well.'
Though the immediate object of 'The Metropolitan Protectives' was to assure a nervous middle class that it would be well protected during the forthcoming Great Exhibition, Dickens' larger interest in the matter transcended the topical. Crime detection, police courts, law enforcement, and similar subjects always fascinated him. He wrote several articles for Household Words on such topics, and he often included similar materials in his novels.

Harry Stone; © Bloomington and Indiana University Press, 1968. DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

Compiled in large part from Thomas Keightley, The History of England, and from George L. Craik and Charles MacFarlane, The Pictorial History of England.