"A House to Let" is a set of short stories by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter. It was originally published in 1858 [1] in the Christmas edition of Dickens's Household Words magazine. Collins wrote the introduction and collaborated with Dickens on the second story and ending, while Gaskell and Proctor wrote the third and fifth chapters respectively. [2] [3]
"A House to Let" was the first collaboration between the four writers, although Collins and Dickens had worked with Procter on previous Christmas stories for the magazine in 1854, 1855, and 1856. The four authors would write together again in 1859's "The Haunted House" which appeared in the extra Christmas number of All the Year Round , the successor to Household Words which Dickens had started after a dispute with his publishers.
In a letter to Collins from 6 September 1858, Dickens outlined his idea for a Christmas story. He originally envisaged the story being written by himself and Collins with his plot outline fleshed out by Collins, but was later to invite Gaskell and Procter to contribute chapters. Dickens and Collins wrote the first chapter, "Over the Way", and the last chapter "Let at Last" together, and each of the writers wrote one of the intervening chapters: Gaskell "The Manchester Marriage", Dickens "Going into Society", Procter "Three Evenings in the House" and Collins "Trottle's Report".
The plot concerns an elderly woman, Sophonisba, who notices signs of life in a supposedly empty dilapidated house (the eponymous "House to Let") opposite her own and employs the efforts of an elderly admirer, Jabez Jarber, and her servant, Trottle, to discover what is happening within. [4]
A dramatisation of "A House to Let" was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during the week of 11–15 December 2006. It was repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra during the week 26–30 December 2011, again in December 2014 and again during the week 19–23 December 2016. A further repeat on BBC Radio 4 Extra was in December 2018.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life; the rest she omitted, deciding certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford (1851–1853), North and South (1854–1855), and Wives and Daughters (1864–1866), all of which were adapted for television by the BBC.
William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright known especially for The Woman in White (1859), a mystery novel and early sensation novel, and for The Moonstone (1868), which established many of the ground rules of the modern detective novel and is also perhaps the earliest clear example of the police procedural genre.
Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. It was originally published as a serial from 1837 to 1839 and as a three-volume book in 1838. The story follows the titular orphan, who, after being raised in a workhouse, escapes to London, where he meets a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin, discovers the secrets of his parentage, and reconnects with his remaining family.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1854.
Cranford is an episodic novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell. It first appeared in instalments in the magazine Household Words, then was published with minor revisions as a book with the title Cranford in 1853. The work slowly became popular and from the start of the 20th century it saw a number of dramatic treatments for the stage, the radio and TV.
Household Words was an English weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens in the 1850s. It took its name from the line in Shakespeare's Henry V: "Familiar in his mouth as household words."
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was the first novel by English author Charles Dickens. Because of his success with Sketches by Boz published in 1836, Dickens was asked by the publisher Chapman & Hall to supply descriptions to explain a series of comic "cockney sporting plates" by illustrator Robert Seymour, and to connect them into a novel. The book became a publishing phenomenon, with bootleg copies, theatrical performances, Sam Weller joke books, and other merchandise. On its cultural impact, Nicholas Dames in The Atlantic writes, "'Literature' is not a big enough category for Pickwick. It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call "entertainment". Published in 19 issues over 20 months, the success of The Pickwick Papers popularised serialised fiction and cliffhanger endings.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the final novel by the English author Charles Dickens, originally published in 1870.
All the Year Round was a Victorian periodical, being a British weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens, published between 1859 and 1895 throughout the United Kingdom. Edited by Dickens, it was the direct successor to his previous publication Household Words, abandoned due to differences with his former publisher.
The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home is a novella by Charles Dickens, published by Bradbury and Evans, and released 20 December 1845 with illustrations by Daniel Maclise, John Leech, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield and Edwin Henry Landseer. Dickens began writing the book around 17 October 1845 and finished it by 1 December. Like all of Dickens's Christmas books, it was published in book form, not as a serial.
The Woman in White is Wilkie Collins's fifth published novel, written in 1860 and set from 1849 to 1850. It started its publication on 26 November 1859 and its publication was completed on 25 August 1860. It is a mystery novel and falls under the genre of "sensation novels".
No Thoroughfare is a stage play and novel by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, both released in December 1867.
The bibliography of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) includes more than a dozen major novels, many short stories, several plays, several non-fiction books, and individual essays and articles. Dickens's novels were serialized initially in weekly or monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.
"The Haunted House" is a set of short stories published in 1859 for the weekly periodical All the Year Round. It was "Conducted by Charles Dickens", with Charles Dickens writing the opening and closing stories, framing stories by Dickens himself and five other authors.
Harriet Parr (1828–1900) was an English author of the Victorian era, who wrote under the pseudonym Holme Lee. She also wrote stories for children.
This is a bibliography of the works of Wilkie Collins.
Adelaide Anne Procter was an English poet and philanthropist.
"A Terribly Strange Bed" is a short story by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1852 in Household Words, a magazine edited by Charles Dickens.
Lois the Witch and Other Tales is an 1861 collection of five stories by Elizabeth Gaskell. The book was published by Bernhard Tauchnitz in Leipzig.
"The Trial for Murder" is a short story written by Charles Dickens in 1865. It was originally published under the title "To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt" as a chapter in Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions in an extra Christmas volume of the weekly literary magazine, All the Year Round. It was later published in 1866 in a collection of ghost stories known as "Three Ghost Stories", along with "The Haunted House" and "The Signal-Man".
A House to Let public domain audiobook at LibriVox | Novels |
|  |
|---|---|---|
| Short stories |
| |
| Short story collections |
| |
| Plays |
| |
| People |
| |
| Novels |
|  |
|---|---|---|
| Short story collections |
| |
| Short stories |
| |
| Non-fiction |
| |
| Related |
| |
| In Christianity | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
In folklore | |||||||||||||||
| Companions of Saint Nicholas | |||||||||||||||
| Traditions |
| ||||||||||||||
| By country | |||||||||||||||
| Music | |||||||||||||||
| Other media | |||||||||||||||
| In modern society |
| ||||||||||||||
| Food and drink |
| ||||||||||||||
| Novels and novellas |
| ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short stories |
| ||||||||
| Children's |
| ||||||||
| Poetry |
| ||||||||
| Collections |
| ||||||||
| Magazines |
| ||||||||
| Nonfiction |
| ||||||||
| Other | |||||||||
