The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To ROBERT MELROSE,1 29 MAY 1866

Text from facsimile on Invaluable online auction site, May 2010.

GAD’S HILL PLACE, | HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.

Tuesday Twenty Ninth May, 1866.

Dear Sir

I beg to thank you cordially for your very obliging letter and its accompanying little book.2 Do me the justice to believe that I should have done so sooner, but that both favors have only reached me just now on my return to my own home.3

 Faithfully Yours

 CHARLES DICKENS

Robert Melrose, Esquire

• 1. Robert Melrose (?1828-98), a Scotsman employed as a labourer by the Hudson’s Bay Co. on Vancouver Island, from his emigration in 1852.
• 2. Diary of Robert Melrose. Royal Emigrant’s Almanack Concerning Five Years Servitude under the Hudson’s Bay Company (n.d.): see Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 213 n.4. For CD’s warm if qualified response, see To Melrose, 11 June 1866 (Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 213).
• 3. CD had been largely out of London on his Spring reading tour, April-May (see Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 533).