GEORGE SILVERMAN’S EXPLANATION by Charles Dickens; edited...

GEORGE SILVERMAN’S EXPLANATION by Charles Dickens; edited and with an introduction and notes by Harry Stone. Illustrated by Irving Block (California State University Northridge Libraries, Santa Susana: $85; 44 pp.). Cal State Northridge has saluted its 25th anniversary in a handsomely literary way by publishing one of Dickens’ more obscure works, “George Silverman’s Explanation,” in a luxuriously printed limited edition. It is prefaced by Harry Stone, a member of the Northridge faculty, an internationally recognized authority on Dickens, and is illustrated attractively by Irving Block. The publishing history of “George Silverman’s Explanation” is unusual. The tale first appeared, in three installments, in the Atlantic Monthly, timed to coincide with one of Dickens’ American tours. In order to ensure an accurate text, Dickens sent corrected proof sheets to Boston, where it was published before it came out in England and is thus one of a very few of Dickens’ works to make its first appearance in the United States. This adds to the appropriateness of its appearance here for the first time as an independent book, barring the 1878 publication in Brighton of a pirated edition of 53 pages bound in pink paper, surely as ephemeral a piece of printing as one could hope to record. The brief narrative is an unrelievedly savage attack on human hypocrisy and greed and the canting of evangelical Christianity. George Silverman is the eternal innocent, the eternal victim, cheated throughout his life, which he recounts with unconscious and sometimes unconvincing irony. In his introduction, longer than the work itself, Stone makes an ingenious case for the story’s being in essence a miniature novel that represents almost the entire range of Dickens’ achievement. Whatever one may feel about this, the book is a satisfying piece of fine printing and a fit tribute to its author and its sponsoring institution.