The Charles Dickens Letters Project

Period: 
1841-1850
Theme(s): 
friends
social engagements

To ADA LOVELACE,1 [?4 or 11 APRIL 1847] 

Text from facsimile in Christie's online catalogue, July 2020.

Address: The | Countess of Lovelace. 

Chester Place2

Sunday Evening 

Dear Lady Lovelace

            I have, most unfortunately, someone from the country3 dining here; and I fear I may not get rid of him in time to come round to you. I will be more than usually dull, however, and perhaps he'll go. – If I were alone, I should be really delighted to respond to your very kind note by putting myself in the Brougham and coming round, immediately.

            In case I should not be released in an hour or so, I will repeat my call in Grosvenor Place,4 on Tuesday afternoon before dinner time. Pray do not mind being out. I shall be close in your neighbourhood in any case.

            I write in the dark – legibly, I hope.

                        Always Dear Lady Lovelace

                                    Yours very faithfully

                                                CHARLES DICKENS

  • 1. Augusta Ada King, née Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852; Dictionary of National Biography); mathematician, scientist, and computer pioneer. Lovelace and CD likely met through Charles Babbage, to whom she was introduced in 1833. CD had written a very formal letter to Lovelace on 31 Mar 1847, requesting the address of a friend living in Genoa, Sir George William Craufurd, 3rd Baronet of Kilbernie. CD wrote that he “has an interest” in an old servant of Craufurd’s (Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 49).
  • 2. CD and his wife Catherine rented a house at 1 Chester Place, Regent’s Park, from March to June 1847; a tenant was occupying their Devonshire Terrace home. Their eldest son Charley had come down with scarlet fever at King’s College, which necessitated their early return to London; the rest of the children followed from Paris a few days later (see To Augustus Tracey, Pilgrim Letters 5, pp. 32-33). The family had been in France since Nov 1846.
  • 3. Unidentified.
  • 4. Lady Lovelace was temporarily resident in Grosvenor Place, 1847-8.


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