Mrs Lirriper - Charles Dickens and others

Published by Hesperus Classics: London, 2006. Originally published as 'Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings' (1863) and 'Mrs Lirriper's Legacy' (1864) in All The Year Round.

Charles Dickens is by far my favourite fiction author. I didn't enjoy his books when I was a child, but once I was old enough to get his humour and satire I fell in love with his way of writing. I collected all of his novels (and over time will review them for this blog), and then came across this book at a book fair.

Intrigued by the existence of something Dickens wrote that I had never heard of, I purchased it immediately and sat down to read.

It turns out that Mrs Lirriper is one of Dickens' "framing story" style collections of short stories. As the editor of various publications, Dickens would give his contributors a loose concept within which to base their stories, otherwise giving them somewhat free reign in terms of style, genre and plot. In Mrs Lirriper, that framing device is Mrs Lirriper, an older widow running a boarding house, and her long-term resident "The Major" writing stories that the other boarding house residents tell them, to "Jemmy", their 'adopted son'. Jemmy's origin is itself part of the introductory story (written by Dickens himself) and is a typical Dickens tear-jerker, wherein a rogue husband runs off, leaving his pregnant wife behind in the lodgings, who gives birth and promptly dies of grief.

Dickens tells it better than that.

The collection is a great addition to the library of a Dickens aficionado, and the bonus is that it exposes the reader to works by a number of other Dickens contemporaries. To give the full list, there are stories by Elizabeth Gaskell, Andrew Halliday, Edmund Yates, Amelia Edwards, Charles Collins, Rosa Mulholland, Henry Spicer and Hesba Stretton, ranging in genre from comedy to tragedy to horror.

Dickens remains the star of the show, but as a taster for Victorian literature, Mrs Lirriper is well stocked.

Completed 6 July 2019.

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