The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To SAMUEL JOHNSON,1 15 MARCH 1869

MS Garth Johnson. Address: Mr. Samuel Johnson | 28 South Castle Street | Liverpool.

26 Wellington Street, Strand, London.

Monday Fifteenth March 1869.

Sir

I must distinctly inform you that I cannot in any way whatever enter upon the consideration of the circumstances you state to me. They are associated with complicated affairs of other people, of which I have never had the slightest knowledge, and with which I have nothing to do.2

Your obedt. Servant

 CHARLES DICKENS3

• 1. Samuel Johnson (1820-1899); Liverpool printer and book publisher whose business appears to have failed c. 1861; since then he had moved from job to job including bookseller, photographic artist, clerk in a brewery; he married twice and had 14 children but at this date his first wife had died, leaving him with eight children of whom the youngest was 12 years old.
• 2. It is possible that Johnson hoped to get back into publishing himself, or to advance either his brother’s or one of his elder sons’ careers with CD’s help.
• 3. CD was on the Provincial reading tour of Oct 68-Apr 69 which ended in his collapse at Preston on 22 Apr; he read six times in Liverpool in Oct and it is probable that Johnson heard him; on 11 Mar CD, who had learnt of the death of his friend, Sir James Emerson Tennent (see Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 701n and Pilgrim Letters 12, passim), rushed south after his reading in York, cancelling a second reading in Hull on 12 Mar in order to be at the funeral that day. CD’s next reading was in London on 16 Mar.