The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ,1 6 DECEMBER 1856

Text from facsimile in the possession of Dietmar Böhnke.2

Tavistock House, London | Sixth December 1856

My Dear Sir

My friend Mr Wilkie Collins3 is anxious to have your opinion in reference to the letter on the other side.4 Nothing is said of paying anything for the right of translation;5 and he thinks, as a matter of principle, that he ought to have something, however little. Do you6 think any thing is to be got? And if so, can you tell him the best way of getting it?

With kind regard from my family to yours

Believe me ever | Faithfully Yours

CHARLES DICKENS

The Chevalier Bernhard Tauchnitz

• 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, 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. 325.
• 3. William Wilkie Collins (1824-89, Dictionary of National Biography), writer. Met CD through the painter Augustus Egg in 1851 and acted in his amateur company. He and CD became close friends. Collins was a prolific contributor to Household Words, and to All the Year Round, in which The Woman in White, No Name, and The Moonstone appeared.
• 4. Now lost, but relating to the publication of Collins's The Dead Secret in the Tauchnitz series "Collection of British Authors"; it emerged as vol. 386. See To Wilkie Collins, 13 December 1856, in Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 237 and n.
• 5. The Dead Secret was translated by August Kretzschmar (1812-72), who had also translated works by William Harrison Ainsworth, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Thomas Carlyle, and William Makepeace Thackeray. It was published as Ein tiefes Geheimnis by Voigt & Günther in 1862.
• 6. Word deleted.