Publisher's Synopsis
A House to Let is a novella originally published in 1858 in the Christmas edition of Dickens' Household Words magazine. Each of the contributors wrote a chapter (stories within a story, and in the case of Adelaide Anne Procter, as a story in verse) and the whole was edited by Dickens. The plot concerns an elderly woman, Sophonisba, who notices signs of life in a supposedly empty dilapidated house (the eponymous "House to Let") opposite her own, and employs the efforts of an elderly admirer, Jabez Jarber, and her servant, Trottle, to discover what is happening within. First Page: A HOUSE TO LET (FULL TEXT) by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide Ann Procter Contents: Over the Way The Manchester Marriage Going into Society Three Evenings in the House Trottle's Report Let at Last OVER THE WAY I had been living at Tunbridge Wells and nowhere else, going on for ten years, when my medical man very clever in his profession, and the prettiest player I ever saw in my life of a hand at Long Whist, which was a noble and a princely game before Short was heard of said to me, one day, as he sat feeling my pulse on the actual sofa which my poor dear sister Jane worked before her spine came on, and laid her on a board for fifteen months at a stretch the most upright woman that ever lived said to me, "What we want, ma'am, is a fillip." "Good gracious, goodness gracious, Doctor Towers!" says I, quite startled at the man, for he was so christened himself: "don't talk as if you were alluding to people's names; but say what you mean."
