ABSTRACT
Early in 1854 Dickens was engrossed with Hard Times and with plans for the serialisation of North and South, which was to follow it in Household Words. So preoccupied was he, he told EG in a letter of 18 February, that her review of Claude Fauriel’s Chants Populaires de la Grèce Moderne (1824–5) in the number for 25 February (9:205, pp. 25–32) almost slipped his mind: ‘Such has been the distraction of my mind in my story that I have twice forgotten to tell you how much I liked Modern Greek Songs’ (CD Letters, vol. vii, p. 278). EG had probably been introduced to Fauriel’s work through the clever and unconventional Mary Mohl, née Clarke (1793–1883) whom she met on her visit to Paris in May 1853. Madame Mohl, as she was known, ‘Clarkey’ to her intimates, had a long and passionate friendship with Fauriel (1772–1844), a polyglot French scholar. Three years after his death, in 1847, she married his friend, Julius Mohl (1800–76) a German orientalist.
