July–August 1858

This chapter details events that occurred in London between July and August 1858. These include the absurdly magnified rift in the Garrick Club caused by the callow Edmund Yates's casually malicious article on Thackeray. The main event in this saga occurred on 10 July, when the Garrick held a special meeting of its members to decide what to do about Yates. After much ado about not very much during the summer, the chief result was ‘the temporary estrangement of Mr Thackeray and Mr Dickens’. The remainder of the chapter describes Dickens's reading tour; the exploits of Dickens's minor character in A Tale of Two Cities, Mr Stryver; the continued press coverage of the Great Stink; and Disraeli's whitebait dinner.