ABSTRACT
A further letter from Jeffrey to Dickens (apparently not extant) had a notable effect on the novel. Dickens wrote to Forster, on 21 December 1847: ‘Note from Jeffrey this morning, who won’t believe (positively refuses) that Edith is Carker’s mistress. What do you think of a kind of inverted Maid’s Tragedy, and a tremendous scene of her undeceiving Carker, and giving him to know that she never meant that?’ (Life, 484). Jeffrey’s hint was taken: a rare example of Dickens’s yielding to such advice.
