Retitled 'A Fly-Leaf in a Life' in collected editions of the series.

Dickens's 'Farewell Tour' of public readings in the provinces had come to an abrupt end at Preston on 22 April, when medical advisers agreed with him that 'the readings must be stopped' in view of 'symptoms that must not be disregarded' (Nonesuch, Vol. III, p. 722).

That night's reading, and twenty-five subsequent dates, were cancelled, causing considerable disruption and during his convalescence Dickens found himself having to write to friends as far afield as Australia, to scotch rumours that his health had failed him (see To Mr Rusden, 18 May 1869; Nonesuch, Vol. III, p. 725). Friends feared, however, that the recovery was not so complete as Dickens wished to suggest, and his death just over a year later from a related condition seems to have influenced Chapman & Hall's decision in 1874 to omit the present item—which so clearly yet uncharacteristically takes this private matter as its subject—from their enlarged edition of The Uncommercial Traveller, Library Edition (1874). It was collected later by B. W. Matz for the 'Gadshill Edition' of Dickens's works for Chapman & Hall in 1897-1898, and Charles Dickens Jnr. subsequently noted the paper's

pathetic interest in connection with its author's premature death. It is always the saddest of reflections to me that, if he could have been induced to take warning of the temporary breakdown to which it alludes, the end might have been long postponed. (The Uncommercial Traveller, ed. by Charles Dickens Jnr, [1925], p. xxi)

MS. Draft [?May 1869], Houghton Library, University of Harvard, MS Eng. 58.4. Folio 3 of ff. 1-6 consists of p. 448 torn from the 'Cheap Edition' of Little Dorrit (Bradbury & Evans, 1861), with two of the three text paragraphs enclosed in MS quotation marks, and the third cancelled with four vertical strokes. MS ff. 1-2 and 4-6 are heavily amended, with rare vertical interpolations on f. 1. The title and all subsequent references to 'the fly-leaf' until f. 6 are later insertions.

Literary allusions:

• 'At first, he was dead... for many years': Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857), Book 2, Ch. 25;
• 'playing sick lion': the lovesick lion in the fable 'Le Lion amoureux' allows his teeth and claws to be removed and dogs to be set on him, Jean de la Fontaine, Fables Choisies Mises en Vers (1668) Book 4, Fable 1;
• 'Mrs Trollope's book on America': Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), which Dickens read in 1841 and owned in an edition of 1832 'with many humorous illustrations' (Stonehouse).

Author: John Drew; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume IV: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers, 1859-1870, 2000.

DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

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