The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To THOMAS LONGMAN,1 3 FEBRUARY 1870

MS Free Library of Philadelphia

5 Hyde Park Place W

Thursday Third February 1870. 

My Dear Longman 

I do not see anything to amend in the enclosed papers. Charles Reade2 (Junior Athenaeum Piccadilly)3 looks well after his copyrights and knows the subject. I think he should be invited.

Faithfully Yours alwys

CD.

• 1. Thomas Longman (1804-79), Chairman from 1842 of the Longmans publishing firm, which he managed with his brother William (1813-87). The company published works by many important authors, including John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Disraeli, and Thomas Babington Macaulay; it also published the Edinburgh Review.
• 2. Charles Reade (1814-84), novelist and dramatist, best known for The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). His novel [Very] Hard Cash was published in All the Year Round in 1863; when it ended CD took the extraordinary step of publishing a statement in which he dissociated himself, as editor, from the statements and opinions of his ‘literary brother’ (All the Year Round 10 [26 Dec 1863], p. 419), on account of Reade’s overt expressions of sexuality. Reade was well known for the lucrative deals he struck with publishers, and for his advocacy of international copyright; to this end published an attack on literary piracy entitled The Eighth Commandment (1860), which was admired by CD. Reade, in turn, greatly admired CD, and referred to him as ‘my master’ (C. L. Reade and Compton Reade, Charles Reade: A Memoir [1887], II, p. 37).
• 3. The Junior Athenaeum was a London gentlemen’s club, opened in 1864, in what was formerly Hope House, built by the Duke of Newcastle in 1849-50.