The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To [?JOHN POOLE],1 [?MAY 1862]2

Text from facsimile of fragment in on-line catalogue of Live Auctioneers (14 April 2005). 

Many thanks for the curious and interesting MS.3  

Faithfull Alwys 

CD.

“Paul Pry”—M-S 

May 1862 

• 1. John Poole (1786-1872; Dictionary of National Biography: see Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 672n), miscellaneous writer, particularly noted for his farces, the most successful, Paul Pry (1825), giving him the soubriquet by which he is identified on this fragment by another hand than CD’s. He gave up writing about 1845, his health broken by heavy drinking, and lived in Paris: CD obtained a Civil List pension for him in December 1850 (see Pilgrim Letters 6, pp. 233 & 239).
• 2. The date is given at the end of the fragment in another hand than CD’s and in a different ink from “Paul Pry”. Poole had returned from Paris by June 1862 and was living in Kentish Town: see To Poole, 13 June 62, Pilgrim Letters 10, p. 93.
• 3. Unidentified; possibly by Poole, though CD reported in 1850 that Poole, in “a prematurely shattered state”, was “perfectly unable to write” (To Lord John Russell, 18 Dec 50, Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 239). CD’s description of Poole to Collins in October 1862 does not suggest any return of literary powers (Pilgrim Letters 10, p. 138).