The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To Thomas Mitton,1 5 August 1846

MS Charles Dickens Museum
Address: Thomas Mitton Esquire | 23 Southampton Buildings | Chancery Lane | London | Angleterre

Rosemont, Lausanne, Switzerland. Fifth August 1846.

My Dear Mitton. I have no doubt you have been looking once or twice for a letter from me, since I left home.2 I have written to very few people indeed, for as soon as we were comfortably established here, I went to work at the new book3 of which I am happy to say I have completed the first number and begun the second.4 I have also made a week’s trip among the mountains covered with eternal snow and ice,5 which block up the view from these windows. And wonderful and indescribable the scenery among them is.

    The town of Lausanne is prodigiously ugly, and (I should hope) the dullest in all the world. But the country is most charming, and there are more beautiful walks about here, than I have ever seen in the neighbourhood of any other place. Our house (to which a farmhouse is attached) stands in the midst of meadows, orchards, and vineyards of its own, on a beautiful slope of land on the side of a hill, stretching from the town down to the Lake of Geneva of which our best windows command a lovely view. The town is at about ten minutes distance, and when it is lighted at night, the lamps and candles dotting the crown and side of the hill make it very pretty and cheerful. There are innumerable bowers and smoking-retreats in the garden; and the grounds are so large, that the children seldom go beyond them. We have on the ground floor a stone hall, two drawing rooms opening on the garden, a dining room, kitchen and servants’ room, and excellent cellarage. Above, a brick hall, two best bedrooms, my study,6 do7 dressing room, and three Nurseries. Above that, in the roof, a most extraordinary place like a Barn, common to most Swiss houses, and generally used for storing grain and vegetables for winter use. Out of this, three servants’ rooms open. And that is the whole house. Up stairs is a broad balcony sixteen paces long; and below it, a stone colonnade of the same size, full of flowering plants. My landlord,8 who is what we should call in England the Sheriff of the town, lives, with a rich widow whom he married, in another house like a lodge, down at the Garden Gate. He is a Swiss, but served in the English Navy 18 years, and speaks the language perfectly. He, and the farmer who holds under him and lives in the farmhouse, keep the grounds, garden, flowers, and so forth in good order; and I pay £10 English per month for the whole set out.

    Except in some few things it is not at all a cheap place — dearer than Genoa, and as dear, I should say, as Paris. The most astonishing circumstance to me, is that Bread, of all things in the world, is dearer9 at this moment, than in London! Meat is pretty cheap, and very good. So is poultry. We contract for everything at the same price which is charged to the Proprietor of the Hotel, and have a very good cook. The native wine is something between Vinegar and pickled cucumbers, and makes you wink10 and cry, when11 you taste it. But I get very good French wine (red) at tenpence the bottle. This we drink as you would drink Beer in England. I also get very good Madeira at about 3/– or 3/6d, and a very good effervescent wine indeed called Swiss champagne at 3/4d[.] Geneva Hollands12 is very fine, and the Brandy is very good too. Milk and butter, and so forth, we get from the farm in any quantity. Ice is also cheap and clean.13 The rooms are small, as they are in all Swiss houses, with a view to the water; but everything is very clean, and very neat.

    There are only four English families here, but with them we are, of course, on very good terms.14 One is a Mr Haldimand,15 a bachelor, and the principal owner of Belgrave Square, London.16 He is quite the king of this place, and has one of the finest country houses in the world, a little below here. He keeps all sorts of vehicles and horses, and we go cruising about the country with him on very pleasant excursions. I keep (and shall keep during the fine weather) the most extraordinary one horse carriage you ever saw. It is a sort of car, with a head and curtains to it, in which you sit sideways, three of you, all in a row, like waxwork.17 It is the common carriage of the country, and is made so, that the riders may avoid the wind: which always blows straight up or down the valley. For this machine, and the horse, and his food, and the driver, I pay £2.10.0 English. Per week.

      The wind aforesaid, when it does blow, is of the most extraordinary description. I don’t know what to compare it to. It makes nothing of tearing and twisting up half a dozen trees at a time, and in one instant filling the whole house with leaves and dust. Its fury is quite inconceivable, and it seems to blow in ten thousand little circles, like whirlpools. One is very glad to have it, or the tremendous thunder storms, to get the air cleared and purged of the heat, which is, just now, unusually intense. The houses, being built for snowy weather chiefly, are very hot; the ceilings low; and the beams and rafters large. No amount of heat would tell, in a house like the Peschiere at Genoa,18 as the present heat tells here. It is next to impossible to sleep at night. The floors, and walls, and ceilings, get hot — like the sides of an oven — and though there are outside blinds to all the windows, and doors from one room into another, so that you can make a draught through19 a whole story at once, it is perfect suffocation upstairs between 1 and 5 in the day. I have a cold bath in the house, or I don’t know what I should do. It plays the devil with my side, as great heat always does; being almost the only thing that damages me.

      Fancy making from this — as I was doing every day last week — on to a Sea of ice,20 unfathomable in depth, five and twenty miles long, and tossed up in immense waves, like the spires of21 Gothic churches! Picture me clambering over this, with a great leaping pole, and half a dozen iron points buckled on the soles of my shoes, and washing my face with snow, and lying down to drink melted ice like chrystal, and staggering and hauling myself up into places like Dreams, under the direction of a Mountaineer-Guide apparently divested of all human capacity of tumbling down or tiring himself — and there you have me, to a T.

      Charley22 goes to school, kept by a German,23 about a quarter of a mile off. He is a weekly boarder, and comes home every Saturday. There are only two other English boys, so I hope he will be set up in French for life, before he comes home. He speaks the language always, now, and can make himself understood anywhere; but does not speak correctly, yet. I have been going at it rather hard too, and found myself at first very much confused by the Italian; for as soon as I begin to think in a language which is not my own, I naturally begin to think in that. Georgina24 knows it extremely well, however, so we do wonders by talking together.

      I purpose to move the Caravan to Paris at the end of November,25 as I hope to do a good deal with that city, and have a great school in my eye for Charley.26 You must come over there with me, for a week, when we get settled, and I come to London. Nothing can be more surprising or completely new. You would be in a perpetual state of amazement.

      When I add that Katey27 and Mamey28 have a Swiss Governess every day, and that all the children are well and hearty, and that they and their mama and aunt, send you all sorts of kind remembrances, I think I have exhausted my household news — except that we lost a Portmanteau at Ostend, containing all the children’s clothes, which came to hand last Thursday! We had maintained an animated correspondence in the meantime with every station on the Belgian and German Railroads. Whenever they get a parcel without a passenger, they put it away somewhere, smoke a pipe, and f[orget abou]t29 it.

      I hear rumours of the cholera being in London.30 It was never [      ],31 and I trust in God it never will be. The Peasants who work in the vineyards have suffered very much this year, from the heat: and many of them, I understand, have died in consequence. They are a very hardy people generally, though a little given to drunkenness — how they can ever drink enough of that wine to get drunk, is their affair: not mine. Their great amusement is rifle-shooting, which takes place on all public holidays, of which there are a good many. They are extraordinary good shots, and think nothing here — while they fire at a small mark on a mountainside, set up across a deep ravine, some two hundred yards wide — of clicking into the very centre of the Bull’s Eye. The town gives prizes, which are generally silver spoons, and the successful competitors walk about with these spoons stuck in their hats and button holes, like flowers. The Inhabitants in general have an immense idea of the Inimitable B,32 and treat him with the greatest respect.

      I am looking for Bradbury and Evans’s halfyearly account, which I expect to receive next Monday.33 I shall hope to hear from you soon. You have received a begging letter or two34 from my Garden Box,35 I dare say?

          Ever Faithfully Yours

                      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. CD left for Switzerland on 31 May.
• 3. Dombey and Son.
• 4. In late June 1846 CD informed Forster, “BEGAN DOMBEY”. The first Number was completed by late July 1846; see To Forster, [25–26 Jul 1846] in Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 589.
• 5. From 28 July to 2 Aug CD visited Chamonix and Mont Blanc, in the company of his wife Catherine and his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth.
• 6. “an” deleted after “study,”.
• 7. ditto.
• 8. Jules Dor, the Sous Préfet of Lausanne; he became Préfet in 1852, and retired in 1868.
• 9. Doubly underlined.
• 10. Word deleted before “wink”.
• 11. ‘if” deleted before “when”.
• 12. A Dutch alcoholic beverage similar to gin, made from a mash containing barley malt, which is then distilled and flavoured with juniper berries.
• 13. This sentence inserted above the caret.
• 14. The circle of English residents in Lausanne who became CD’s friends included Richard and Lavinia Watson, William and Elizabeth de Cerjat, and George and Elizabeth Goff.
• 15. William Haldimand (1784-1862), philanthropist. Son of merchant Anthony Haldimand, and brother of educationalist and Geneva salonnière Jane Marcet; director of Bank of England 1809, and MP for Ipswich 1820-6; settled at Denantou, a country estate near Lausanne, in 1828. In 1843 he founded, with the help of Elizabeth de Cerjat, the Asile des Aveugles in Lausanne, opened 1844; contributed £3000 to the construction of the English church at Lausanne; was noted for his hospitality to English and other travellers.
• 16. In 1825 Haldimand negotiated a 99-year lease on Belgrave Square, where, of the 49 houses that his developer syndicate built, he owned 14; his brother George owned 16.
• 17. The char-de-côté, or char-à-banc, described in Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland as the “national carriage of French Switzerland” (London: John Murray, 1838, p. xvi).
• 18. Dickens and his family moved into the Palazzo Peschiere in late Sep 1844; they left Genoa on 9 June 1845.
• 19. One letter deleted after “through”.
• 20. On 2 August CD had returned from Chamonix, and had visited the Mer de Glace, a glacier on the northern slopes of the Mont Blanc massif; see To John Forster, [2 Aug 1846], in Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 594.
• 21. “ch” deleted after “of”.
• 22. Charles Culliford Boz Dickens (1837–96), CD’s eldest son.
• 23. The school, La Villa, was founded in 1840 by Theodore Devrient, born at Leipzig in 1808. It stood on the site now occupied by no. 57, avenue d’Ouchy.
• 24. Georgina Hogarth (1827–1917).
• 25. CD left for Paris on 16 November.
• 26. The phrase “and have a great school in my eye for Charley” written above the caret.
• 27. CD’s daughter, Kate Macready Dickens (1839–1929).
• 28. CD’s daughter, Mary (Mamie) Dickens (1838–96).
• 29. Two words, presumably “f[orget abou]t”, torn by the seal.
• 30. A major outbreak of cholera originated in India in 1846, and spread throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. See “The Cholera”, The Times, 4 July 1846, p. 3; “The Public Health”, The Times, 24 July 1846, p. 8; “London, Thursday, July 30 1846”, The Times, 30 July 1846, p. 5; and “Cholera in the Metropolis”, The Times, 31 July 1846, p. 3.
• 31. Two or three words torn by the seal.
• 32. CD used this appellation at the time to describe himself in letters to friends, including W.C. Macready, Clarkson Stanfield, Thomas Beard, and Émile de la Rue (see Pilgrim Letters 4, pp. 9, 18, 312, 324, 356).
• 33. The statement of account which CD received from Bradbury & Evans for the half-year ending 30 June 1846 showed that his share of profit on Pictures from Italy was £304.15.6, on The Cricket on the Hearth £294.6.5, Oliver Twist £81.7.2, and A Christmas Carol £28.7.6; a deduction for his “share of deficiency of new edition of the Chimes” left a balance of £629 (MS National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum).
• 34. CD was beset by begging letters; while he was out of the country these were not sent on to him; instead these were dealt with by Mitton. He did, however, make provision for a woman called Greenwood, who lived in Blenheim Street; see To Frederick Dickens, [16 June 1846], in Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 563.
• 35. In the garden of his Devonshire Terrace house, CD had a letter box, from which correspondence could be lifted when he was away; see Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 549.