ABSTRACT

Macready (1793–1873), the leader of the English stage since 1819, met Dickens in 1837 and soon became one of his most intimate friends. They much admired each other’s work. Nicholas Nickleby was dedicated to Macready, and Dickens’s second daughter (born 1839) was named after him. Macready’s political radicalism chimed with Dickens’s. The ‘sufferings’ which Little Nell’s death reawakened were doubtless his grief over the death of his three-year-old daughter Joan, in November 1840. ‘Wonderful Dickens,’ he exclaimed on reading the final number of the Clock, ‘which ends very sadly and very sweetly.’