The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ,1 7 APRIL 1859
Text from facsimile in the possession of Dietmar Böhnke.
Replaces extracts (aa) in Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 48.
aOFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND | Thursday Seventh April 1859.
My dear Sir
I duly received your kind letter and its enclosure of a bill at 3 days after sight fora £30. aAccept my thanks.
Any arrangement that you may wish to make in respect of this Periodical2 after it shall have come into existence, I will at once consent to.
My story will be published in it, in weekly portions. It will also be published by Messrs. Chapman and Hall in monthly parts of the same size and price as Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit etc. Of these monthly parts there will be 8.a3 Perhaps you may not consider it too much, to pay for this story, half of4 what you paid for Little Dorrit. aYou shall have the latter sheets in advance of their publication, as heretofore.a
Believe me always |Faithfully Yours
CHARLES DICKENS
- 1. Baron Bernhard Christian Tauchnitz (1816-95), publisher, of Leipzig. Born at Schleinitz; nephew of the publisher Karl Tauchnitz. Founded his own firm in Leipzig in 1837. The firm began its “Collection of British Authors” Sep 1841 with Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham. Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and American Notes had appeared before the end of 1842, and Nicholas Nickleby in June 1843. He and CD became friendly, and CD sent Charley to Leipzig to learn German. According to John Forster, Tauchnitz always paid liberally. He wrote to Forster after CD’s death: “All Mr Dickens’s works have been published under agreement by me. My intercourse with him lasted nearly twenty-seven years. The first of his letters dates in October 1843, and his last at the close of March, 1870 [see To Tauchnitz, 31 March 1870]. Our long relations were not only never troubled by the least disagreement, but were the occasion of most hearty personal feeling; and I shall never lose the sense of his kind and friendly nature. On my asking him his terms for Edwin Drood, he replied, ‘Your terms shall be mine’” (John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J.W.T. Ley [London: Cecil Palmer, 1928], p. 807n).
- 2. CD's journal All the Year Round.
- 3. A Tale of Two Cities appeared June-December 1859. Each part featured two illustrations and a wrapper design by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne); see Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 48 and nn. Tauchnitz paid CD £110 in total for publication of A Tale of Two Cities, in monthly parts; for details see To Tauchnitz, 18 April 1859.
- 4. "of" written below caret.