But this strange sentimental and relic-hunting worship of Dickens has many more innocent manifestations. One of them is that which takes advantage of the fact that Dickens happened to be a journalist by trade. It occupies itself therefore with hunting through papers and magazines for unsigned articles which may possibly be proved to be his. Only a little time ago one of these enthusiasts ran up to me, rubbing his hands, and told me that he was sure he had found two and a half short paragraphs in All the Year Round which were certainly written by Dickens, whom he called (I regret to say) the Master. Something of this archaeological weakness must cling to all mere reprints of his minor work. He was a great novelist; but he was also, among other things, a good journalist and a good man. It is often necessary for a good journalist to write bad literature. It is sometimes the first duty of a good man to write it. Pot-boilers to my feeling are sacred things; but they may well be secret as well as sacred, like the holy pot which it is their purpose to boil. In the collection called Reprinted Pieces there are some, I think, which demand or deserve this apology. There are many which fall below the level of his recognised books of fragments, such as The Sketches by Boz, and The Uncommercial Traveller.One can picture the editor tearing his hair out after reading these remarks: no editor wants the prologist to knock down the worth of the book he's expecting to sell. He probably asked GKC to say something positive in the last paragraph.
It's impossible not to recall these lines while working on an project like What's Wrong, which doesn't stop to consider the quality of the material collected, and so ends up including so much that is irrelevant or even incomprehensible today. GKC might have found it amusing, irritating, or perhaps deplorable to see that he was being subjected to the same treatment. He might even have referred to the "History of a Half-Truth" that he tells in one of the articles I'm about to mention.
Still, once you have embraced completism, you can be forgiven if you make your best effort to make your collection complete. This occurred to me these days as I was working on Time's Abstract and Brief Chronicle (Fortnightly Review, 1904-5) and Where All Roads Lead (Blackfriars, 1922-3), two serials that were reprinted in Collected Works XI and III respectively, and in both cases some parts were missing: in "Chronicle" part 5 was left out, and in "Roads" it was parts 6 and 7 (a sort of appendix: "A Note on Comparative Religion"). It's easy to understand how this happened. On the one hand, "Roads" was taken from the US version published The Catholic World, which already omitted the last part. But more importantly, neither piece appears to have been written according to a plan, at least in the opinion of this reader. "Chronicle" is a running commentary on contemporary matters, a rambling discussion between three characters that could have gone on indefinitely, and the last installments of "Roads" read more like an afterthought than anything else. None of the pieces really reaches a sense of closure that can tell the collector the hunt is over. In any case, it's all stuff that GKC said much better in later writings.
However that may be, there they are, hopefully complete now.
