The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT1, 27 FEBRUARY 1842

Text from facsimile in Peter Harrington online catalogue, May 2020.

Carlton House,2 New York.

Twenty Seventh February

1842. 

My Dear Sir.

            If I had any controul over the accompanying books,3 they should be unillustrated,4 and in outward appearance more worthy of your acceptance. If you will receive them, such as they are, as a little token of my sincere regard and admiration, you will please me very much.

                                    Always believe me

                                                Faithfully Yours

                                                CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878; Dictionary of American Biography), poet and journalist. Practised law in Massachusetts 1815-25. Made his name as America's leading poet with "Thanatopsis" (1817), and Poems (1821,1832); published further collections in 1842 and 1844. One of the very few poets praised in an article on American poetry (almost certainly by John Forster: see To Edgar Allan Poe, 6 Mar 1842, in Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 106, n6) in the Foreign Quarterly Review 32 (Jan 1844): 315: "When America shall have given birth to a few such poets as Bryant, she may begin to build up a national literature to the recognition of which all the world will subscribe." From 1829 editor (joint-owner 1836) of the New York Evening Post, which he made strongly Democratic and increasingly Abolitionist. In it on 18 Feb 1842 he wrote of CD: "He has many characteristics to interest the higher orders of mind. They are such as to recommend him peculiarly to Americans. His sympathies seek out that class with which American institutions and laws sympathize most strongly" (quoted in Parke Godwin, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant [New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883], vol. 1, p. 397). He later supported CD over international copyright. On 19 Apr 1842 he wrote to R.H. Dana, Sr: "You were right in what you said of Dickens. I liked him hugely, though he was so besieged while he was here that I saw little of him--little in comparison with what I could have wished" (Godwin, vol. 1, p. 396n). Later in 1842 he sent CD a copy of his The Fountain, and Other Poems, published that July, inscribed "from his friend and admirer | William Cullen Bryant". But he protested in the Evening Post, 9 Nov 1842, at CD's sweeping condemnation of the American press in American Notes; and the fact that he failed to see CD on at least four later visits to London suggests that he was among the American friends that CD lost through the views expressed in both the travelogue and Martin Chuzzlewit.
• 2. CD occupied a "very splendid suite" consisting of a parlour, drawing-room, and two bedrooms overlooking Broadway and Leonard Street. See Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 70.
• 3. CD made a gift to Bryant of the first American edition of his works. This set of six volumes was published in 1842 by G.L. Curry & Co. of New York, Lea and Blanchard of Philadelphia, and other firms in Boston and Baltimore; it comprised Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge.
• 4. The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge were illustrated by J. Yaeger.