The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To MESSRS CHAPMAN AND HALL,1 9 JUNE 1837
MS Charles Dickens Museum.
On mourning paper.2
Doughty Street
Friday morning
Dr Sirs,
I enclose a short address, and a shorter advertisement.3 If you have any suggestion to make relative to either, I shall be at home all day.
With reference to the advertisement I leave its appearance or non-appearance at the present moment entirely to you. I have been considering the matter, and really see no reason for its coming out now, which appears to me to have rather a tendency to weaken its effect, than to do us any good. The only reason for putting it forth at this instant was our apprehension of Macrone’s4 publishing the Sketches in parts.5 It seems to me that the necessity for the advertisement was removed with this apprehension.
However, it is a point of business, and I leave it to you.
Believe me,
Faithfully Yours
CHARLES DICKENS
Messrs Chapman and Hall
- 1. Booksellers and publishers, of 186 Strand, since 1830; CD’s publishers from 1836 (beginning with Pickwick Papers). Edward Chapman (1804-80), son of a Richmond solicitor, was the more literary of the two partners; William Hall (?1801-47) was more concerned with business arrangements. For a history of the firm, see Arthur Waugh, A Hundred Years of Publishing: Being the Story of Chapman & Hall (London: Chapman & Hall, 1930).
- 2. CD’s sister-in-law Mary Hogarth had died on 7 May 1837.
- 3. CD prepared an advertisement declaring that the new issue of Sketches by Boz proposed by publisher John Macrone (who owned the copyright) would not carry the author’s sanction. The reason for his objection to Macrone’s scheme is enunciated in a letter to John Forster of the same day: "I have a very natural and most decided objection to being supposed to presume upon the success of the Pickwick, and thus foist this old work upon the public in its new dress for the mere purpose of putting money in my own pocket. Neither need I say that the fact of my name being before the town, attached to three publications at the same time, must prove seriously prejudicial to my reputation" (Pilgrim Letters 1, pp. 269–70).
- 4. John Macrone (1809-37; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), CD’s first publisher. He paid the author £100 for the rights to the first series of Sketches by Boz, and £150 for the second series. CD was contracted, for £200, to produce for Macrone a 3-volume novel entitled Gabriel Varden, The Locksmith of London. This did not materialise, and CD moved to Chapman and Hall. The history of the Sketches copyright is discussed in detail by Robert L. Patten in Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 28-42.
- 5. See CD’s letter to John Forster of ?9 June, in which he expresses apprehension about Macrone’s plan to publish Sketches by Boz in monthly parts, to emulate Pickwick Papers (Pilgrim Letters 1, pp. 269–70). The plan was not executed, and the copyright for Sketches was sold to Chapman and Hall on 17 June 1837, for £2000; for the text of the agreement see Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 653.