Writings by famous writers found in a periodical edited by 'Charles Dickens'

The authors of thousands of articles, short stories and poems, printed anonymously in a literary magazine edited by Charles Dickens, have finally been revealed after an antiquarian book dealer discovered a bound collection of the periodicals annotated by Dickens himself.

According to The Independent, previously unidentified writings by Elizabeth Gaskell; Wilkie Collins; and Eliza Lynn Linton, the first salaried female British journalist, have been discovered in a collection of a literary periodical, All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens between 1859 and 1870. The magazine contained a mix of nonfiction and fiction, including the serialization of Dickens’s own novels, but didn’t identify its authors, whose identities have largely remained a mystery.

But last September, Dr. Jeremy Parrott, an antiquarian bookseller and academic, bought a 20-volume set of the periodical, and opened it to find pencil annotations, thought to be Dickens’s own, identifying the authors in the margins.

Dr. Parrott announced his findings, verified by Dickens scholars, over the weekend at the annual conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals at Ghent University, The Independent newspaper reported, noting that “between 300 and 400 authors have been identified as responsible for some 2,500 contributions.”

The set is thought to have been Dickens’s own collection, sold after his death. The annotations show “seven or eight” previously unattributed contributions by Collins, author of “The Moonstone” and “The Woman in White,” while a number of pieces previously thought to have been written by him seem to have been misattributed. Two essays by Gaskell were listed in the collection, as well as writings by Dickens’s sons Sydney and Frank, and a poem believed to be by Lewis Carroll.

Paul Lewis, an expert on Collins, described the findings to The Telegraph as “the Rosetta Stone of Victorian studies.”