The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To LEIGH HUNT,1 12 JANUARY 1853 

Replaces extract in Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 6.

Text from facsimile in Freeman's Auctions online catalogue, May 2020.

Tavistock House

Twelfth January 1853. 

My Dear Hunt.

            Many thanks for your note. I hope I may receive it and your admirable opening up of Kensington,2 as an evidence of your being in stout heart and good spirits again.

            The paper, to be thoroughly effective in Household Words, should not (saving for some very special reason) be longer than about five pages, or five and a half.3

                                                Faithfully Yours always

                                                CHARLES DICKENS

Leigh Hunt Esquire.

• 1. James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859; Dictionary of National Biography), essayist, critic and poet. Founder with his brother John of the Examiner 1808. First met CD through John Forster, to whom he afterwards wrote, "What a face is his to meet in a drawing room! It has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings!" (Life of Charles Dickens, F, II, i, 84). Hunt was the admitted original of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, a parody that caused him much distress, and for which CD later apologised.
• 2. Hunt's seven papers on Kensington appeared in Household Words, between 6 Aug 1853 and 25 Feb 1854; they were reprinted as The Old Court Suburb; or Memorials of Kensington, Regal, Critical, and Anecdotal (2 vols, London: Hurst & Blackett, 1855).
• 3. The average length of the pieces was six pages. In a letter to CD on 22 June 1853, Hunt provided an explanation for his delay; he added, concerning length, "I have taken my licence, still subject however to your judgment" (MS Johns Hopkins University).