The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To MARY NICHOLS,1 25 JULY 1863
MS Huntington Library.
OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND,
Saturday Twenty Fifth July 1863.
My Dear Madam.
As I announced the Trip in the Unholy Land, “in two parts”,2 and as the enclosed MS resumes it and would be inconsistent with that announcement, I cannot have the pleasure of accepting the paper.
For any long story, continued from No. to No. there is no opening at present in these pages.You will the better understand the assurance [ ]3 I give you on this head, when I explain that we have four such compositions already by us.4 The subject of the story you suggest, moreover, is a very very difficult one. In connexion with it, many things need to be known and treated of, which would demand unusual powers.
“The Orders and Disorders of [ ]5 charity” is a title suggestive of a very useful paper on a very fruitful subject.6 But it would require a pretty [ ]7 accurate knowledge of the working of our English charitable Institutions, and of the faults in that working. As to the sisterhood of St. Vincent de Paul,8 it is essential to remember that a sisterhood is easy of establishment in a Roman Catholic community, far less easy in a Protestant community. As to the latter, the difficulties in the way of that kind of combination must be set against the blessings of civil and religious liberty and of the Reformation.
I repeat from my heart what you write of your country.9 “It is all very awful to me.” I wish I could discern through the whirl and uproar, any tokens of that “purification by blood and fire,”10 but I confess I see none.
Dear Madam | Faithfully Yours
CHARLES DICKENS
Mrs. Nichols.
- 1. Mrs Mary Sargeant Neal Gove Nichols (1810-84; Dictionary of American Biography), miscellaneous writer, reformer and water-cure practitioner; advocated mesmerism, temperance and dress reform. Published Experience in Water-Cure, New York, 1849, and several novels. With her second husband, Thomas Low Nichols (see Pilgrim Letters, 21 Apr 64, fn), established Nichols' Journal of Health (Cincinnati) 1853, advocating free love, spiritualism and health reform. They published jointly Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results, 1854. Settled in England on outbreak of American Civil War and conducted jointly a water-cure establishment in Great Malvern 1867-75; 1875-86 ed. jointly the London Herald of Health.
- 2. A fictive account of an Englishman’s visit to America during the Civil War, suggesting the conflicting loyalties of Americans; it appeared in All the Year Round: as “two chapters”, 18 and 25 July (IX, 500, 524).
- 3. Word deleted by CD.
- 4. Not certainly identified; Elizabeth Gaskell’s A Dark Night’s Work and Charles Reade’s Very Hard Cash (published vol. issue as Hard Cash) were both running in vol. IX; Henry Spicer’s A White Hand and a Black Thumb began in vol. X; and G. A. Sala’s Quite Alone and Charles Lever’s A Rent in a Cloud in vol. XI.
- 5. Word deleted by CD.
- 6. No such paper appeared in All the Year Round.
- 7. Word deleted by CD.
- 8. The nursing order, the Sisters of Charity, founded in France, 1633, by St Vincent de Paul (1581-1660).
- 9. The progress of the American Civil War; news of the Battle of Gettysburg (1-3 July) was in The Times, 6-20 July.
- 10. Biblical in tone, but not a quotation; presumably a quotation from Mrs Nichols’s article.