object and province

Charles Dickens to W. Wilkie Collins

Tavistock House,
Sunday, Fifteenth April, 1855.

My dear Collins, ----Hurrah!
I shall be charmed to see you once more in a Normal state, and propose Friday next for our meeting at the Garrick, at a quarter before 5. We will then proceed to the Ship and Turtle.

I fell foul of Wills* yesterday, for that in "dealing with" the second part of your story [Sister Rose]** he had not (in two places) "indoctrinated" the Printer with the change of name. He explained to me that on the whole, and calmly regarding all the facts from a politico-economical point of view, it was a more triumphant thing to have two mistakes than none--and, indeed, that, philosophically considered, this was rather the object and province of a periodical.
Faithfully always, C. D.

* W. H. Wills, sub-editor of Household Words.
** The French Governess's Story of Sister Rose first published in Household Words April 1855, and later published with five other short stories in his first volume of shorter fiction After Dark (1856).

-from the Letters of Charles Dickens to Wilkie Collins edited by Laurence Hutton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891) p. 31.