The Charles Dickens Letters Project

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Individual letter:

Dickens, Charles. To [addressee], [date of letter]. Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship). [URL of individual letter], [date of access].

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Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship), DickensLetters.com.

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Period:

1861-1870

To W.J. FARRER,1 7 MAY 1868

MS Bloomsbury Auctions, July 2010.

OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND,

Thursday Seventh May 1868.

Dear Sir

I have to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of yesterday’s date, enclosing the keys of the trunk and desk containing the papers by the late Mr. Townshend.2 Will you be so kind as to instruct Messrs. Banting3 to send that trunk and desk4 here, marked “Private”. Pray assure Miss Coutts5 that I will lose no time in examining the papers very carefully, with a view to the discovery of any document that may bear upon Mr. Townshend’s testamentary intentions,6 or upon the question of the rings.7 I need not add that I will duly report the result of my examination to you. Am I to understand that all Mr. Townshend’s papers and correspondence are contained in the trunk and desk—with the exception of a few unimportant packets I have received from Mr. Wills? I seek information on this head, because I rather think that Mr. Townshend once mentioned to me that there were papers at Lausanne.8 Among the packets received from Mr. Wills I find the enclosed letter, which I take it is in Mrs. Brown’s9 hand writing. If so, will you tell Mrs. Brown with my regards that finding it unopened, I so return it to her. If it should not be in her hand, please let me have it back.

William James Farrer Esquire

Dear Sir | Faithfully Yours

CHARLES DICKENS

1. William James Farrer, partner in Farrer, Ouvry & Farrer, CD’s solicitors.
2. The Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend (1798-1868; Dictionary of National Biography), poet and antiquarian: see Pilgrim Letters 2, p. 110n. He had died, 25 February, CD receiving the news while still in America (Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 72; To Georgina, 12 Mar 1868).
3. William Banting & Sons, undertakers, of 9 Park Lane, Grosvenor Square, and 27 St James’s, Piccadilly.
4. Writing from America (31 March) to Edward Jackson of Wisbech, Townshend’s agent, CD assumed that Townshend’s private papers were “sealed up and reserved” for him (Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 87).
5. Angela Burdett Coutts (1814-1906; Dictionary of National Biography), later Baroness Burdett-Coutts. For her main interests in Townshend’s will see Pilgrim Letters 12, pp. 88n, 175.
6. For Townshend’s Will and its main provisions, see Pilgrim Letters 12, pp. 88n, 175 & nn. Townshend had also directed that his Religious Opinions should be prepared for publication by CD, who found them “in the strangest fragments” and would not have proceeded “if I had any discretion in the matter” (Pilgrim Letters 12, pp. 267-8; To De Cerjat, 4 Jan 1869). The Opinions were eventually published, Nov 1869 (Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 379 n.7).
7. Part of Townshend’s collections, divided between the South Kensington Museums and the Wisbech Museum (Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 88 n.4). The rings, their stones intended to link in with Townshend’s geological collection, went with Townshend’s pictures to South Kensington (Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 268 & n; To De Cerjat, 4 Jan 1869).
8. Townshend’s Swiss home.
9. Hannah Brown, née Meredith (d.1878), Miss Coutts’s close friend and companion.