Brief description: Manuscript fragment of 'Out of The Season' by Charles Dickens, 28 June 1856
Label: Out of the Season was an essay about the French satirist Madame Roland originally printed in Household Words, Dickens's first weekly magazine, on 28 June 1856. This partial manuscript appears to be an early draft which was rewritten. The bottom line ("Madame Roland and I took leave of...") is the same in the final text, but the preceding paragraph is very different from the finished essay.

Jeanne-Marie Philpon married French industrial scientist Jean-Marie Roland in 1780 and directed her husband’s political career during the French Revolution. She supported revolutionary ideas, but she didn’t support their violent actions. A fan of Jean-Jaques Rousseau, she hosted literary salons that became the meeting place for more moderate factions of the revolutionaries. She even got her husband to speak out against Robespierre, one of the leaders of the radical Jacobin Club. She was imprisoned in 1793, where she wrote her memoirs before she was guillotined.
Collection: Archives & Manuscripts
Object number: A999
Object type: manuscript
Production date: 28/6/1856
Inscription content: [Indecipherable], and the charms of her engaging conversation [crossed out] [indecipherable] I must confess that [crossed out] if she but had only a few more faults only a few passionate failings of any kind I should love her better. If she were not quite so clear ? [indecipherable] [crossed out] [indecipherable] with the weaknesses of her husband’s character [crossed out] if she did not use her shining scalpel with quite so cool a hand in [crossed out] anatomising him; if she had known him to persuade himself that he [crossed out] had written [crossed out] certain admired passages which she [crossed out] in fact wrote for him, [crossed out] and if [crossed out] she had never [crossed out] mentioned it, but had delivered her fair head to Samson with that harmless secret in her heart; I should have been more [indecipherable] devoted to her when she asked at the scaffolds foot, for leave to write the strange thoughts that one [indecipherable] perhaps there was among them some weak loving [crossed out] thought to this effect! Who knows! Madame [crossed out] Roland and I took leave of
Credit line: Purchased with support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, the Friends of the Nations' Libraries and The Dickens Fellowship.

Manuscript fragment of 'Out of The Season', 28 June 1856