The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To FLORENCE ROSS CHURCH,1 6 AUGUST 1867
MS The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
GAD’S HILL PLACE,
HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.
Tuesday Sixth August, 1867
Dear Mrs. Ross Church
I have read your book,2 and I think it evinces your possession of considerable power. I cannot honestly say that I find your power to be always well directed, or that I do not find many evidences of its being impetuously and daringly used. But I have not the slightest doubt of its existence within you.
You will excuse my adding that I think you unwise in freely touching forbidden topics.3 If I also object that you do so with a certain “coarseness”, I do not use that word in its conventional acceptation, but as meaning with an absence of that very great delicacy of art which can alone carry so difficult a load. Your general idea too, of the dissipated part of such a life as your hero’s, is (so far as I know) not like the Truth, and suggests something worse. Similarly, he very often speaks as educated gentlemen (to say nothing of this gentleman’s being imaginative too) do not speak.4
It is very remarkable to me that while you are indignant with men5 for making laws unjust and oppressive towards women, you do not see that the cruel persecutors of erring women are their own sex. Against the cruelty of women to women, men are mostly powerless. And yet in the very same breath you indicate this last lamentable fact.
The opening of the book is very good indeed, both as an indication of character and a piece of construction. Gerald’s father and mother, both highly meritorious. The father’s death, excellent. Ada (except that she does not swim as well in philosophical waters as in those of the Isle of Wight) very good too. All about her child, natural and affecting.
I write with difficulty, being laid up with erysipelas in the foot,6 which puts me into a highly inconvenient attitude. But I desire to lose no time in telling you what you ask me to tell you – the truth to the best of my belief.
Always | Faithfully Yours
CHARLES DICKENS
The last volume looks as if it had cost you the least pains?
- 1. née Florence Marryat (1838-99; Dictionary of National Biography), daughter of Capt. Frederick Marryat (1792-1848; Dictionary of National Biography); married Thomas Ross Church, June 54; prolific novelist, playwright, actress and singer: see Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 67 and later vols.
- 2. The Confessions of Gerald Estcourt, 3 vols, 1867.
- 3. These topics include marital separation, elopement, Estcourt’s living with Julia before making her his first wife, and suggestions of various vices and sins in high society. According to Michael Sadleir, during the first part of her writing life Florence Marryat was regarded “as a purveyor of dangerously inflammatory fiction, unsuitable for reading by young ladies, yet highly to their taste” (XIX Century Fiction, 1951, I, 299).
- 4. Estcourt is often outspoken, using slang expressions and mild expletives (for which he is sometimes rebuked).
- 5. Ada, who eventually becomes Estcourt’s second wife, passionately expresses her indignation at the treatment of women in conversation with him (e.g., Vol. I, Ch. 10 and Vol. 2, Ch. 10).
- 6. Described in To Forster, [6 Aug 67], Pilgrim Letters 11, pp. 407-408; presumably the condition CD later ascribed to his over-walking in the snow, Feb 65: see ibid., pp. 18-19 and also, To Mrs Ross Church, 17 May 70.