The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ,1 27 MARCH 1854
Text from facsimile in the possession of Dietmar Böhnke.2
Replaces extract in Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 300.
Address: À Monsieur: | Monsr Le Chevalier Bernhard Taüchnitz3
Tavistock House I Twenty Seventh March 1854.
My Dear Sir
Charles4 has written to me, to propose his going with some friends to Berlin at Easter time for a few days.5 Supposing the friends to be approved of in Leipzig, I am willing that he should make the journey. Will you kindly advance to him the necessary funds for that purpose?6 And when you happen to see Dr Müller,7 will you mention the expedition to him, and tell him, with my compliments that I have not thought it worth while to trouble him with a French letter respecting it?8
You have seen the9 announcements, no doubt, of my new story in Household Words.10 Would you wish to anticipate it or to have any particular and separate arrangement made respecting it? I shall be very happy to do any thing you may wish.11
My Dear Sir | Very faithfully Yours
CHARLES DlCKENS
à Monsieur | Le chevalier Bernhard Taüchnitz
- 1. Baron Bernhard Christian Tauchnitz (1816-95), publisher, of Leipzig. Born at Schleinitz; nephew of the publisher Karl Tauchnitz. Founded his own firm in Leipzig in 1837. The firm began its “Collection of British Authors” Sep 1841 with Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham. Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and American Notes had appeared before the end of 1842, and Nicholas Nickleby in June 1843. He and CD became friendly, and CD sent Charley to Leipzig to learn German. According to John Forster, Tauchnitz always paid liberally. He wrote to Forster after CD’s death: “All Mr Dickens’s works have been published under agreement by me. My intercourse with him lasted nearly twenty-seven years. The first of his letters dates in October 1843, and his last at the close of March, 1870 [see To Tauchnitz, 31 March 1870]. Our long relations were not only never troubled by the least disagreement, but were the occasion of most hearty personal feeling; and I shall never lose the sense of his kind and friendly nature. On my asking him his terms for Edwin Drood, he replied, ‘Your terms shall be mine’” (John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J.W.T. Ley [London: Cecil Palmer, 1928], p. 807n).
- 2. Böhnke published his transcription (featuring some errors) of this letter, together with brief annotation, in "The Correspondence between Charles Dickens and Bernhard Tauchnitz: General Observations and Newly Discovered Letters", Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2013), p. 322.
- 3. Thus in MS. The "ü" occurred commonly in German script of the time, to distinguish it from "n".
- 4. Charles Culliford Boz Dickens ("Charley", 1837-96), CD's eldest son.
- 5. Among Charley's friends in Germany was Francesco Berger (1834-1933, Dictionary of National Biography), a musician, who was at the time a student at Leipzig's Konservatorium der Musik, founded by Felix Mendelssohn in 1843. Berger was later "admitted on terms of intimacy to the whole of the Dickens family" (Berger, Reminiscences, Impressions and Anecdotes [London: Sampson Low & Co. (1913)], p. 17). He also composed the music for Dickens's productions of Wilkie Collins's plays The Lighthouse (1855) and The Frozen Deep (1856); see To Berger, 13 Jan 1857, in Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 259.
- 6. Tauchnitz paid Charley’s expenses locally, and deducted the amount from payments due on account from Tauchnitz to CD. The only payments made by CD for Charley's German expenses were one for £25 on 28 February 1853, shown in the Coutts & Co. bank ledger as "Germany", and one for £5 on 2 March 1853, listed as "Charles's sundries". For a similar practice of deductions against profits, used by CD's British publishers Bradbury & Evans and Chapman & Hall, to offset the purchase of books for CD's personal use, see Leon Litvack, “What Books did Dickens Buy and Read? Evidence from the Book Accounts with his Publishers”, in Dickensian 94.2 (1998): 85-130.
- 7. Professor O. C. Müller, 6 Tauchaer Strasse, Leipzig, a schoolmaster with whom Charley Dickens lived for six months in 1853, in order to learn German.
- 8. There is no surviving letter to Müller, though there are mentions in Pilgrim Letters 7, pp. 34, 256. Presumably CD wrote to the schoolmaster in French because he could neither write nor speak German.
- 9. "new" deleted after "the".
- 10. Hard Times, published weekly in Household Words between 1 April and 12 August 1854.
- 11. Hard Times appeared in two parts, in Tauchnitz’s "Collections of British Authors", vols 303 and 305, and as a complete text in vol. 307 (all published in 1854).