The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To ADA LOVELACE,1 14 JUNE 1847

Text from facsimile in Christie's online catalogue, July 2020.

Chester Place.2

Fourteenth June 1847. 

My Dear Lady Lovelace.

            On Thursday next at half past Seven, I hope to break the spell.3 Many thanks for giving me another chance of doing so!

                        Always Faithfully Yours

                                    CHARLES DICKENS

The | Countess of Lovelace

• 1. Augusta Ada King, née Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852; Dictionary of National Biography); mathematician, scientist, and computer pioneer. Lovelace and CD likely met through Charles Babbage, to whom she was introduced in 1833.
• 2. CD and his wife Catherine rented a house at 1 Chester Place, Regent’s Park, from March to June 1847; a tenant was occupying their Devonshire Terrace home. Their eldest son Charley had come down with scarlet fever at King’s College, which necessitated their early return to London; the rest of the children followed from Paris a few days later (see To Augustus Tracey, Pilgrim Letters 5, pp. 32-33). The family had been in France since Nov 1846.
• 3. CD had evidently attempted to call on Lovelace previously, and had been unsuccessful, following his letter to Lovelace on 31 Mar 1847, requesting the address of a friend living in Genoa, Sir George William Craufurd; see Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 49, and To Ada Lovelace [?4 or 11 April 1847].