Footnotes

• 'MUCH OCCUPIED JUST NOW' – DICKENS HARD AT WORK FINISHING DOMBEY AND SON AND RECLAIMING FALLEN WOMEN. At the end of February Dickens took his wife Catherine for a week in Brighton to concentrate on writing the final double number of Dombey, which he finished on 24 March – a day earlier than estimated in this letter – the final number appearing on 11 April and the completed book the day after. He wrote to Mark Lemon on the same day as our letter: 'I shall be very busy finished Dombey, in a few days'. The "good work of a less public and extensive interest" which he tells Turner must take precedence over other better-known charitable endeavours is his home for fallen women, Urania Cottage in Shepherd's Bush, which had opened the previous November.
  
  Sydney Turner, recipient of this letter, was resident chaplain to the institution of the Philanthropic Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders, which placed him at the head of a large reformatory school for convicted boys; a position he used 'to campaign for the introduction of government-sanctioned institutions to reform and rescue wayward children' (Michelle Cale, ODNB). His best-known publication was a report of the Tocqueville-inspired penitential colony for juvenile delinquents at Mettray, which appeared in 1846. Our letter appears to be hitherto unknown and is not printed in the Pilgrim Edition.