ABSTRACT
T h e more we see of Life and its brevity, and the World and its Vanities, the more we know that no exercise of our abilities in any Art, but the addressing of it to the great ocean of humanity in which we are drops, and not to bye-ponds (very stagnant) here and there, ever can or will lay the foundation of an endurable retrospect.’1 The great ocean of humanity’ that had swept through the Crystal Palace in the summer of 18 51 also represented the new mass readership that Dickens identified as both his best market and his best hope for im mortality: distinction, he suggests, can only be achieved by a surren der to the mass. In pitching themselves at an 'endurable retrospect’, clearly the challenge for all writers at mid-century was to find the right balance between the ownership and the address of their work, so as to allow their literary property to circulate, without losing con trol of it. In thinking about Dickens’s work at this time, then, it is less useful to see privacy and publicity as opposed terms, than as highly confused terms, which were ultimately inextricable.
