The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ,1 7 NOVEMBER, 1860 

Text from facsimile in the possession of Dietmar Böhnke.2 

OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND

Wednesday Seventh November 1860.

My Dear Mr Tauchnitz


I have been travelling and have only just received your letter, or I would have answered it sooner.

No. 77 contains the conclusion of the present series of the Uncommercial Traveller.3 

Believe me always 

Faithfully Yours 

CHARLES DICKENS 

• 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, p. 807n).
• 2. Böhnke published his transcription (with 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), pp. 328-9.
• 3. This last instalment of the first series (retitled "The Italian Prisoner" for the volume edition of 1861) was published in All the Year Round 4 (13 October 1860): 13-17, the 77th number of the magazine. CD provided this information in order to facilitate Tauchnitz’s publication of Hunted Down: A Story; The Uncommercial Traveller: A Series of Occasional Papers (Collection of British Authors vol. 536, 1860).