The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To ?HENRY MORLEY,1 ?SEPTEMBER 1852

Text from facsimile (fragment) in Bonham's online catalogue, March 2011.

            My impression that many of the Parisian Theatres are subsidized, is derived from my eye-sight remembrance of the length of their list, which is annually published in the French papers.2

            What an unfortunate pair of Corsican Brothers3 you are! Regard4 to the present sufferer –

                                                            Ever Faithfully

                                                           CD

• 1. Probably Henry Morley (1822-94; Dictionary of National Biography), apothecary, journalist, and literary scholar. Intended for the medical profession, and studied medicine, as well as arts subjects, at King's College, London, 1838-43, acting as one of the editors of the College magazine for two years. LSA 1843, and in practice 1844-8; after losing his apothecary practice through his partner's dishonesty he conducted schools in Manchester and Liverpool until he moved to London in June 1851. Published his first book of verse, Sunrise in Italy, 1848, and began writing on sanitation for the Journal of Public Health in 1849; when the journal ceased publication John Forster agreed to publish a new series of "How to Make Home Unhealthy" in the Examiner, which had already reprinted the first two articles. Morley met Forster – whom he already admired as a "first-rate man, generous and high-minded" – when he visited London in July 1850, and Forster then engaged him as a paid leader-writer on the Examiner. He was on the staff of CD's journals Household Words (1851-9) and All the Year Round (1859-65), and contributed many articles to both publications.
• 2. In Oct 1852, Morley published "The Theatres of Paris" (Household Words 6 [2 Oct 1852]: 63-9), which focuses on the financial side of theatrical production in the French capital. It includes the observations that "There has been published in Paris, during the present year, the result of an elaborate inquiry into the statistics of the theatres", and that "the French Government...  is accustomed also to make compensatory presents to [theatres], and to help them out of difficulty by subventions" (pp. 63, 65).
• 3. Dion Boucicault's melodrama The Corsican Brothers; or the Vendetta, first performed in 1852, was adapted from Eugène Grange's and Xavier de Montépin's play Les frères corses, first performed in Paris in 1850 with Charles Fechter in the roles of the twin brothers. The play was based on the 1844 novella by Alexandre Dumas, père, in which two brothers, separated at birth, can still feel each other's emotions, even at a distance.
• 4. Thus in MS.