![]() ![]() According to the bookseller, there is only one other known book inscribed by Dickens to George Eliot: a copy of the second edition of The Uncommercial Traveller, inscribed in January 1861. The edition resurfaced in the 1920s, when the step-granddaughter of Eliot decided to sell it. The copy of A Tale of Two Cities he sent to Eliot is a presentation copy – authors would request a handful of copies from their publishers to give away early to the people they wanted to see it, said Pom Harrington at Peter Harrington. Later, when Eliot sent Dickens a copy of her novel Adam Bede, in July 1859, she would reveal her identity – a piece of news Dickens told her he would keep in confidence, adding what a "rare and genuine delight" it had been "to become acquainted in the spirit with so noble a writer". If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began." "I have observed what seem to me to be such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now. "I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman," Dickens continued. ![]() He praised the "exquisite truth and delicacy" of her stories, which he said he had "never seen the like of". Writing to her in 1858 to tell her of his admiration, Dickens was one of the first people to guess that Eliot might be a woman. ![]()
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