No Thoroughfare

A foundling from the Hospital, a wine merchant's clerk, two men with the same name, and a murder attempt on a pass above the Simplon. Dickens and Collins were friends and traveling companions for fifteen years — Collins's brother married Dickens's daughter — and wrote this together for the Christmas number of 1867, then turned it into a play the same season. Fifty-seven plates, from Doré to Marianne North, range across poor-houses, Indian cave temples and an abolitionist rescue, matching the novel's sweep from London alleys to the Alpine pass.