The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To MESSRS BRADBURY & EVANS,1 7 APRIL 1848

MS Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek.

Devonshire Terrace. | Seventh April 1848.

My Dear B and E.

I have no doubt that we shall get as much for Dombey2 as can be got for anything in these times3 – and so am very well satisfied. Is Kettle4 so much within your controul that he can be lent to me next Tuesday?5 He waited on us for some twelve years, – and if I can get him, I would rather have him than a stranger. 

Faithfully Yours alwys

CD.

• 1. Printers and publishers; CD’s publishers since transferring from Chapman & Hall in 1844: see Pilgrim Letters 4.
• 2. CD completed writing Dombey and Son on 23 or 24 Mar (Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 263 & n). The final double number is dated April (issued at the end of March).
• 3. Politics and social unrest might be expected to distract people from fiction. Abroad the February Revolution in France deposed Louis-Philippe, while there were risings in Italy against the Austrians; at home, Chartist agitation was shortly to culminate in the Kennington Common rally of 10 April, while distress was widespread in the manufacturing towns (Pilgrim Letters 5, pp. 253 n.6, 254 & n.4, 273 & n.1). Sales of Dombey were strong throughout the serial publication, with no evidence of decline in the final number or subsequent volume publication: see Robert L. Patten, CD and His Publishers, 1978, ch. 10.
• 4. Not otherwise identified: presumably a Bradbury & Evans employee who also waited at table on a part-time basis.
• 5. The Dombey dinner, 11 Apr, to celebrate completion of publication. Macready noted as also present Ainsworth, Thomas Beard, Browne, Henry Burnett, D’Orsay, Evans, Forster, George Hogarth, William Jerdan, Lemon, Frank Stone, Thackeray: see Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 266n. Bradbury was ill and unable to attend.