The Charles Dickens Letters Project

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Individual letter:

Dickens, Charles. To [addressee], [date of letter]. Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship). [URL of individual letter], [date of access].

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Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship), DickensLetters.com.

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Period:

1851-1860

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friends

public readings

To MRS WHITFORD,1 29 OCTOBER 1858

MS Huntington Library. Address (Sotheby’s catalogue, July 1972): Mrs. Thomas Whitford, Belgrave,2 near Leicester.3

Sheffield, Friday October Twenty Ninth | 1858.

My Dear Mrs. Whitford

I received your letter at Leeds4 this morning, and I read it with much interest, and I hasten (in a moment’s interval of rest), to reply to it.

It would have given me great pleasure to have come to see you, if such a thing had been reasonably possible. But the fatigues and occupations of the tour now drawing to a close, are so great, that from its commencement in the beginning of August down to this time I have set foot in no friend’s house and have eaten or drunk at no friend’s table. The “very grand folks” and the very plain folks everywhere have been equally shut out from me. I have hurried for a few hours at a time to London or to my little country house in Kent whenever I have had a short space of repose; but I have known all other diversion from the one thing I have had to do, to be quite incompatible with it.

My mother,5 who is alive and well though not unshaken by Time, will will6 be greatly interested when I tell her of your having written to me. Letitia and her husband,7 I often see. They have no children, and are doing very well.

I beg to send my regard to your liege Lord, and to that most wonderful of all the prodigies I have ever heard of—the only child—who is not a prodigy.

Believe me | Faithfully Yours

CHARLES DICKENS

Mrs. Whitford.

1. Mrs Thomas Whitford: clearly an early friend of the Dickens family who had written to CD after seeing an announcement of his reading at Leicester, 4 Nov.
2. A large village about 2 miles north-east of Leicester. Thomas Whitford is listed among “Gentry”.
3. CD read the Christmas Carol in the New Music Hall on 4 Nov: see Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 692, n.3.
4. CD read at Leeds, 28 Oct, on his Autumn reading tour.
5. Elizabeth Dickens (1789-1863); she had had “a strong objection to being considered in the least old” (10 Feb 55; Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 534 & n), but would shortly decline into senility.
6. Written twice by CD.
7. This suggests a particular friendship with Letitia (who married Henry Austin in 1837). For possible identification of Mrs Whitford with a Miss Urquhart, see Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 692, n.4. and Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 31 & nn.