The Charles Dickens Letters Project

Advanced Search

Theme

Correspondent

How to cite:

Individual letter:

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].

Database:

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

Find us on social media:

Period:

1861-1870

Theme(s):

railway

Ellen Ternan

To ELLEN PAINE,1 1 JANUARY 1866

Text from facsimile on eBay, October 2016.

GAD’S HILL PLACE

HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.

Friday First January 1866

Dear Madam

Either I have miswritten, or you have misread, a word in my letter. I had no such word as “safely” in my thoughts. I am much mistaken if I did not write “hopefully or usefully.” That opinion I retain. You may clear your mind of any suspicions that I am connected in any way with what you call 'The Stephenson party.'2

Your faithful servant

CHARLES DICKENS

Mrs. Paine

1. Ellen Matilda Steward Paine (1809-1882), of Rickmansworth. Author of The Two James's and the Two Stephensons; or, The Earliest History of Passenger Transit on Railways (1861). Daughter of William James (1771-1837), railway developer. For a full account of CD’s correspondence with her see Leon Litvack, 'Dickens and the Stephenson Party: New Letters to E.M.S. Paine', Dickensian 114.2 (2018): 149-58. See also To Ellen Paine, 30 Dec 1865 and [5 Jan 1866].
2. A reference to the supporters of George Stephenson (1781-1848) and his son Robert (1803-59), railway engineers. They competed against other firms for the building of railway lines. See CD’s comments to Bulwer Lytton on railways and on the President of the Board of Trade, Thomas Milner Gibson, who had been severely criticised in Charles Tennant’s anonymously published pamphlet, Railways: In a Letter to the Right Honourable the President of the Board of Trade: A Plan for the Systematic Reform of the Railways of the United Kingdom by Legislative Enactment, 1865 (To Edward Bulwer Lytton, 6 July 1865, Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 68). The comments followed a bad accident at Rednal, near Shrewsbury, on 7 June 1865, and the Staplehurst railway accident, 9 June 1865, in which CD and his lover Ellen Ternan were involved. A long letter in The Times, 12 June 1865, by 'R.A.M.', a fellow-passenger of CD's on that Folkestone to London train, strongly criticised the 'human suffering consequent on railway mismanagement'.

Also to this addressee

To Ellen Paine, [5 January 1866]	Read this
To Ellen Paine, 30 December 1865	Read this