The Charles Dickens Letters Project

Period: 
1861-1870
Theme(s): 
books
public recognition

To THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF EDINBURGH,1 29 MAY 1866

MS R & R Enterprises, September 2005. Replaces text from Ramsay's Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character, in Pilgrim Letters 11, pp. 206-7.

GAD’S HILL PLACE, | HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.

Tuesday Twenty Ninth May 1866.

My Dear Sir

I am but now in the receipt of your kind letter and its accompanying book.2 If I had returned home sooner, I should sooner have thanked you for both. I cannot adequately express to you the gratification I have derived from your assurance that I have given you pleasure. In describing yourself as a stranger of whom I know nothing, you do me wrong however. The book I am now proud to possess as a mark of your good will and remembrance, has for some time been too well known to me to admit of the possibility of my regarding its writer in any other light than as a friend in the spirit, while the writer of the introductory page marked VIII in this edition of last yearX3 had commanded my highest respect as a public benefactor and a brave soul.4 I thank you my dear Sir most cordially, and I shall always prize the words you have inscribed in this delightful volume5 very very highly.

 

Dean Ramsay

Yours faithfully | and obliged

 CHARLES DICKENS

  • 1. The Very Rev. Edward Bannerman Ramsay (1793-1872; Dictionary of National Biography), ordained in the Church of England and (1823) took a curacy in the Episcopal Church in Edinburgh; Dean of Edinburgh (1846) and writer; incumbent of St John’s church, Edinburgh, 1830 to his death: see further Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 206, n. 3.
  • 2. Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character, Edinburgh, 1856; 2nd vol. 1861; single “blended” vol. 1864. CD refers to an edition of 1865.
  • 3. A large X in MS; presumably added later by someone other than CD.
  • 4. “I am convinced that every one, whether clergyman or layman, who contributes to the innocent enjoyment of human life, has joined in a good work, inasmuch as he has diminished the inducement to vicious indulgence...I have never found that the cause of morality and religion was promoted by sternly checking the tendencies of our nature to relaxation and amusement”.
  • 5. Not in the Catalogue of the Library of CD, ed. J.H.Stonehouse, the auction catalogue prepared in 1878.