The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To THOMAS HILL,1 8 AUGUST 1840

MS University of Rhode Island Special Collections.

Devonshire Terrace. | 8th. August 1840.

My Dear Mr. Hill—I call you “Mr.” because you are such a veteran, though my inclination is to drop any word that seems to imply any formality between us, and assume the most irreverential familiarity of address. I cannot tell you how much pleasure I have derived from your kind note, and how cheering it is to me to be assured of the friendly interest of one whom I so warmly and truly esteem.2 I receive your congratulations with true gratification, for I know they are sincere and am proud of a place in your kind recollection and warm heart.

Carry with you to Paris and bring back again, my earnest and hearty friendship. Be a reader as long as I am a writer, and let us hope that we may regard each other with the same feelings as those which3 animate4 us now, in some other world where if there will be very few books, there will be (if my faith be at all near the right one) marvellously few booksellers.

Thomas Hill Esquire

Always believe me | Faithfully Yours 

 CHARLES DICKENS

Mrs. Dickens’s “love”.

• 1. Thomas Hill (1760-1840; Dictionary of National Biography), retired drysalter and book-collector: see Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 329n. CD bought books at his sale, Mar 41(Pilgrim Letters 2, p. 229 & nn).
• 2. Presumably Hill had congratulated CD on The Old Curiosity Shop; he attended the dinner (20 Oct) to celebrate completion of Vol.1 of Master Humphrey’s Clock. He died on 20 Dec, after a fall.
• 3. “those which” written above caret.
• 4. Final “s” deleted.