The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To BENJAMIN WEBSTER,1 2 JUNE 1862

Replaces mention in Pilgrim Letters 10, p. 90.

Text from facsimile in Eldred's Auction Gallery online catalogue, Oct 2019.

Address: Private. Benjamin Webster Esquire | T.R. Adelphi2

OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND
Monday Second June 1862

My Dear Webster

    The train I recommend for Saturday the fourteenth June, is from

North Kent Railway, London Bridge
at
2..20 in the Afternoon

My station is Higham (the next beyond Gravesend) for which take your ticket.3 You will find Stanny4 and Davy Roberts5 at the station.6

            Ever Faithfully

                CD.

• 1. Benjamin Nottingham Webster (1797-1862; Dictionary of National Biography), actor, dramatist, and lessee of the Haymarket and the Adelphi theatres.
• 2. Theatre Royal, Adelphi, on the Strand, London.
• 3. CD used the same form of words about the train time and destination in a letter to Clarkson Stanfield; see Pilgrim Letters 10, p. 90.
• 4. Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867; Dictionary of National Biography), marine and landscape painter, and one of CD's closest friends. Joined the Merchant Service 1808 and in 1812 was pressed into the Navy. While serving in HMS Namur painted scenery for theatricals organized by Douglas Jerrold, then a midshipman (see Michael Slater, Douglas Jerrold 1803-1857 [London: Gerald Duckworth, 2002], p. 25); after his discharge continued with scene-painting, decorating the theatre with "works so beautiful, that one regrets the frail materials of which they were constructed ... Mr. Stanfield has created, and afterwards painted out with his own brush, more scenic masterpieces than any man" (comment by W.M. Thackeray in Louis Marvy's Sketches after English Landscape Painters, 1850). Exhibited easel paintings from 1820; ARA 1832; RA 1835. It was possibly through the actor William Charles Macready that CD and Stanfield first met — either on 26 Dec 1837 at the dress-rehearsal of the Covent Garden pantomime, for which Stanfield had painted the diorama, or two days later when they both dined with Macready. Stanfield toured Cornwall with CD in 1842, and provided some illustrations for The Chimes, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man. He also painted scenes for several of CD's amateur theatrical productions.
• 5. David Roberts (1796-1864; Dictionary of National Biography), Scottish painter. Son of an Edinburgh shoemaker; apprenticed to a house-painter for seven years. Scene-painter at Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, 1822-4. First travelled to Europe 1824. Began exhibiting at Society of British Artists. First exhibited at the Royal Academy 1826 (Rouen Cathedral); then regularly from 1835. RA 1841. Travelled widely in Europe, Egypt and Syria. Published his Picturesque Sketches in Spain (1837); The Holy Land, Syria, etc. (3 vols, 1842-3); Egypt and Nubia (3 vols, 1846-9). Selected as one of the decorators for the new Houses of Parliament 1849, but eventually declined. One of the Commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Victoria & Albert Museum has the best collection of his paintings. He had probably met CD through Stanfield, an intimate friend since 1820; his other friends included J.M.W. Turner, William Etty and Daniel Maclise. He painted scenery for CD's amateur theatricals in 1851-2.
• 6. See To Webster dated 28 May 1862: "Don't forget your booked engagement to me. I will let you know a week beforehand, what train I recommend to Stanny and Davy Roberts" (Pilgrim Letters 10, p. 87).