The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To THOMAS MITTON,118 APRIL 1844
Text from facsimile in Raptis Rare Books online catalogue, March 2024.
Devonshire Terrace.
Eighteenth April 1844.
My Dear Mitton.
I am sorry to say, that plan won’t do.2 Because, although Coutts’s were so prompt and polite last time, still they did say “that it wasn’t the kind of note” &c &c — as I wrote you at the time.3 Indeed, I remember to have often heard that they avoid discounting: not having that kind of business.
I wish to Heaven you could think of any other way. I will come down to-day, between 2 and 3.
I have not seen Thomson4 yet. He wrote to say that he was coming. Likewise that his house had not bedrooms enough for ’em, and talking wildly about Houses near Belgrave Square!!
Faithfully Always
CD.
- 1. Thomas Mitton (1812-78), solicitor, one of CD’s closest friends. Son of Thomas Mitton, publican, of Battle Bridge (the district now known as King's Cross), where the Mitton and Dickens families may at some time have been neighbours – perhaps in The Polygon, where the Dickenses were living 1827-8. In recollections given to the Evening Times when she was 95, Mitton's sister Mary Ann claimed to have known CD well as a small girl. Mitton and CD were clerks together for a short time during 1828-9 in Charles Molloy's office, 8 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, where Mitton served his articles. He acted as CD’s solicitor for twenty years. See William J. Carlton, “The Strange Story of Thomas Mitton”, Dickensian 56 (1960): 41–52.
- 2. Mitton had written in response to CD’s request, on 17 April, for advice on how to acquire funds to pay his debts, because his cash flow was under pressure; indeed CD had run out of money completely: his bank balance on 17 April was 1s.1d overdrawn (MS Messrs Coutts). CD wrote: “I am very much and pressingly in want of a hundred pounds until June. Though the time is short, my father’s debts, two quarters income tax &c, coming all at once, drive me, sailing so near the wind by not drawing any profits from C[hapman] and H[all], into a most [un]comfortable corner. Ca[n you oblige] me with this, or devise any [means] of doing so? Send me a line, and say how the land lies in your view” (Pilgrim Letters 4, pp. 107–8).
- 3. Coutts’s Bank discounted a bill for £200 presented by Mitton on 5 Dec 1843 (MS Messrs Coutts); see To Mitton, in Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 604 & n. This time, however, the bank refused to lend more. It would have embarrassed Dickens to ask Coutts to discount another bill; from his letter to Mitton on 22 July 1843, it is obvious that CD felt a delicacy about borrowing from this bank, because of his friendship with Angela Burdett Coutts (see Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 525). If the two letters of 17 and 18 April are taken literally, CD is asking Mitton for advice about how to fund his cash flow problem; in reality, though, he seems to be angling for Mitton to lend the £100 himself, which the bank ledger shows is precisely what Mitton did on 19 Apr (Messrs Coutts). We are grateful to Warren Weiss for this information.
- 4. Possibly James Thomson (1789–1858), brother of the antiquary and librarian Richard Thomson (1794-1865; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography); see Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 218n.