NEWS BY THE MAIL

Evening Star, Issue 2808, 16 February 1872, Page 3

NEWS BY THE MAIL

dickens’s life. Cue of the most pleasurable sensations of the month has been the issue of the first volume of Mr John Forster’s “Life of Charles Dikuns ” The eagerness of “the trade” to get hold of the book was extraordinary ; the whole of the first edition was instantly sold off, and a second is in course of publication. The .volume contains matter that is news not only to the public, but to members of Mr Dickens’s own familv also. In autobiographical passages ho himself states that ■ hen a child of ten years old. he was obliged, owing to his father's troubles, to hire himself out as a tiny assistant in the establishment of a blacking-maker, and that for a long time he was occupied in the work of sticking labels on blacking-bottles, for which service he received so small a guerdon that between its smallness, and the inability of a child to control his passion for pas ry and the like, he was often at the end of the week very hungry and without the means of satisfying his hunger. He says that the impressions made upon him by humiliation and hardship were so strong that it “made him cry ” so long after the birth of his eldest son. But these things he never told to his family. The volume describes his early successes, but does not come down to the time when his domestic ari’angeraents became the talk of the country. Over this portion of the story Mr Foster will, no doubt, go with a delicate hand. The work is dedicated to the great novelist’s tw r o daughters, Miss Dickens and Mrs Charles Collins. MISCELLANEOUS. Gillot, the celebrated pen-maker, is dead Brigham Young has been arrested aud bail refused. In a thunder storm at Portsmouth and vicinity, on Jan. 5, hail fell to the depth of two inches. The glass of nearly all exposed windows was destroyed. The Marquis of Hartington, Chief Secretary of Ireland, in an address to his constituents, declared that the government must be firm in suppressing rebellion in Ireland, and should set its face against leaving education in the hands of the priesthood. A Mr James Phillip, of Bedford row T , London, has made a startling announcement through the English papers, which must carry consternation into hundreds of aristocratic families. What Colepso has done to the Pentateuch, Mr Phillips has done to the companion volume, the B itish Peerage. He has discovered that “nearly the whole of the pedigrees hitherto published are fictitious,” and the genealogical MSS. in the British Museum “simply trash;” while, “ as for the Herald’s College having any right to grant coats of arms, it is so absurd that it if wonderful that any persons should be such addle-headed donkeys as to entertain any such humbug.”