The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To MARION ELY,1 22 JANUARY 1844

Extract and facsimile(aa) in Bonham’s catalogue, 23 March 2004: MS 2 pp; envelope; addressed Miss Ely; dated Devonshire Terrace, 22 January 1844.

Regretting that his sister-in-law’s recovered health2 means that he cannot go to Barham’s3...with an ill grace and a strong grudge, I must resign that blessed corner whereof you give me a glimpse. ...I must get over leaf to give due effect to an Announcement... The Guinea Pig Is Dead He left it in his Will, that he thought Conjuring had been the Death of him.4  

Always Faithfully Yours

 CHARLES DICKENS

Miss Ely. 

• 1. Marion Elizabeth Ely (1820-1913), daughter of Charles Ely and Sara, née Rutt; niece of Rachel Talfourd (1792-1875), wife of CD's friend Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854).
• 2. Georgina Hogarth’s recovery means that her birthday (22 January) will be celebrated; if she had been still ill, CD might reasonably have gone out.
• 3. “Barnham’s” in the source: the Rev. Richard Harris Barham (1788-1845; Dictionary of National Biography), author of The Ingoldsby Legends (1840; 2nd and 3rd series, 1847); contributor to Bentley’s Miscellany. Friend and advisor to Richard Bentley and at Bentley’s request mediated in the publisher’s quarrel with CD, in Jan 39: see further Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 279n. Barham had dined at CD’s on 2 Dec 43, when Marion and the Talfourds were among those present: Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 602 & n.
• 4. CD began conjuring in Dec 42 (see Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 416 & n). This guinea pig is presumably the one featured at Nina Macready’s birthday party, 26 Dec 43, where among other tricks described by Jane Welsh Carlyle, CD changed “a box full of bran into a box full of – a live-guinea-pig!” (The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed Clyde de L. Ryals, Kenneth J. Fielding et al, 1990, vol. 17, p. 220).