This ninth volume presents about 1, 100 letters, many unpublished, from the years 1859 to 1861. It records the writing of two major novels, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, the planning and writing of a substantial amount of the three Christmas numbers of this period, `A Haunted House', `A Message from the Sea', and `Tom Tiddler's Ground', and the establishment of All the Year Round as a new journal to succeed Household
Words. It also shows Dickens's delight with his new Kentish home, Gad's Hill.