The Charles Dickens Letters Project

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Dickens, Charles. To [addressee], [date of letter]. Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship). [URL of individual letter], [date of access].

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Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship), DickensLetters.com.

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To ADAM WHITE,1 2 OCTOBER 1847

Text from transcription (^aa) and facsimile of fragment (^bb) in O.J. Stevenson, “The Eccentricities of Genius,” Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Art and Literature 29.1 (May 1907): 3-4.

^a1 Devonshire Terrace,
York Gate,2 Regent’s Park.
Second October, 1847.^a

^bMr. Charles Dickens presents his compliments to Mr White, and begs to acknowledge the receipt of his obliging communication. Apart from considerations of selection and preference, which arise in the case of such a proposal as Mr White’s, and which might perhaps suggest to Mr Dickens that there are other English writers besides Cowper3 as yet unrecognised in Westminster Abbey, who have at least as strong a claim on public gratitude and remembrance,4 Mr Dickens fears he cannot forward the object in view, for he has resolved never to subscribe to any monument^b ^ato a man of genius, which cannot be contemplated by the people of this country, who speak the language in which he wrote, free from any charge5 and at leisure.<sup>a</sup>6

1. Adam White, (1817–1878; Dictionary of National Biography) naturalist, specialising in arthropods; employed in the Zoological Department of the British Museum 1835-61.
2. Mis-transcribed by Stevenson as “Yorkside”.
3. William Cowper (1731-1800; Dictionary of National Biography), poet and hymn-writer; author of The Diverting History of John Gilpin (1782, which CD knew well), The Task (1785), and Olney Hymns (1779, with John Newton). CD owned a 15-volume set of Robert Southey’s edition of Cowper’s Poetical Works (1835); see the Devonshire Terrace inventory of books in Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 713.
4. Cowper is in fact now commemorated in a stained-glass window in St George’s Chapel, presented to the Abbey in 1876 by American publisher and philanthropist George William Childs, who owned the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend from the 1870s to the 1890s.
5. Parliamentary returns of the fees charged at Westminster Abbey show that in the 1830s threepence had to be paid for admission to Poets’ Corner and the nave of the Abbey (with an additional shilling for access to the transepts and chapels). From summer 1841, however, access to Poets’ Corner was free, with a charge of sixpence required for admission to the remainder of the Abbey.
6. CD’s disinclination to support the initiative was broadcast by the Dundonian critic, poet, divine and Cowper enthusiast George Gilfillan (1813–1878), leading to press reports such as those in the Manchester Courier: “A furious warfare has sprung up between Gilfillan and Charles Dickens. The latter had declined, in somewhat disparaging terms, to subscribe for a monument to Cowper, which provoked the other to tomahawk and scalp him in this ferocious manner: –- ‘The ‘Task’ will outlive the ‘Haunted Man.’ Dickens is but a ‘Cricket on the Hearth.’ Cowper was an eagle of God, and his memory shall be cherished, and his poems read, after the ‘Pickwick Papers’ are forgotten!” (17 February 1849 p. 3).