February 2012
Diary of Sydney Race on visiting the daughter of Charles Dickens, 1913
Reference: M 24,480/A/24
In 1870 Charles Dickens was working on his murder mystery novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He died having only completed the first six of twelve planned installments. The unfinished work has remained one of Dickens' darkest and intriguing stories, with an unknown denouement adding to its mystery.
As today, readers at the time were desperate to know how it ended, and so Sydney Race, an insurance clerk who lived in Nottingham, wrote to Dickens' surviving daughter, Kate Perugini, and visited her in 1913 to see if she could shed any light on who the culprit in the novel was. In his diary he described his visit to her house in Kensington, where he was 'shown into the drawing room which is nicely fashioned after the mid Victorian style'. Here, he met Mrs Perugini, 'a delightfully sweet-looking old lady - has a pleasing, open face, good nose, large bright eyes, white hair - nicely gowned'. She already had a visitor, 'a rather assertive American'.
Race is clear in his diary that he has called on her to talk about Edwin Drood, but unfortunately she is not able to help him: 'she was amused at the way people quarrelled about the plot - when no one really knew what the solution was'. She suggested that perhaps her father's friend might have known: 'no one had been more completely taken into [his] confidence than [Dickens' biographer] John Forster'. But she did not know any more.
Nottingham enjoyed the works of Charles Dickens and many archives survive to show how people celebrated his works. Sydney Race was an active member of Nottingham's Mechanics Institute and a number of posters show that readings were given of Dickens' works. Some of these were given by Dickens' own family: in 1910 Alfred Tennyson Dickens, ('eldest surviving son of the Great Novelist') presented A Night With Dickens; and in February 1912 Dickens' son Henry Fielding Dickens recited 'The Christmas Carol' (DD/MI/300/7, right).
See the diary in more detail here [PDF 2116KB] 
Read a transcript of the diary here [PDF 29KB]
A small display of archives celebrating Charles Dickens' connections with Nottingham is on display in the Archives search room as part of the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Find out more about visiting archives.
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