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Christmas Short Story

Mrs Badgery

A Christmas short story by Wilkie Collins, illustrated by Carolyn Gowdy and with an introduction by Philip Hensher

12 December 2015

9:00 AM

12 December 2015

9:00 AM

Wilkie Collins’s ‘Mrs Badgery’, rarely seen since its first publication in Dickens’s Household Words magazine in September 1857, is an enchanting little chip off the block. Like a lot of British short stories, it is absurd, very funny, and in uproarious bad taste. British writers have often enjoyed stories of making a home, and also the theatrical trappings of grief.

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‘Mrs Badgery’ appears in volume one of The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, edited by Philip Hensher.

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