The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To ANN SUSAN HORNER,1 16 NOVEMBER 1857

Replaces extracts in Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 479.

MS Huntington Library  

TAVISTOCK HOUSE,

Monday Evening Sixteenth November 1857

Dear Miss Horner 

My having been away, has a little delayed my answer to your esteemed note; but I hope this will not seriously inconvenience you. 

The circumstance of this article being a translated pamphlet2, already known in its general purport to the English public, is conclusive against its acceptance for Household Words. If the paper had taken an account of the pamphlet – a dissertation about it, and general description of it – the case might have been different. As it is, I must decline it: very much against my will. 

Pray accept my sincere thanks for your offer, and believe me 

Very faithfully Yours

CHARLES DICKENS

Miss Horner.

• 1. Ann Susan Horner (1816-1900), translator and writer on Italian subjects. She was one of six sisters, five of whom published translations or original works. Horner published A Century of Despotism in Naples and Sicily (1860), The Tuscan Poet G. Giusti and his Times (1864), and (with her sister Joanna) Walks In Florence and its Environs (1873). CD rejected the offer of a novel from her in 1866; see Pilgrim Letters 11, pp. 284-5.
• 2. Probably one of her many Italian sources for the added chapter (see her 2nd vol., p. 473n), but not traced.