The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To CHARLES KENT,1 22 MAY 1868
Replaces Extract in Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 117.
Text from facsimile in Swann Auction Galleries online catalogue, May 2016.
OFFICE OF ALLTHE YEAR ROUND
Friday Twenty Second May 1868
My Dear Kent.
I cannot tell you how truly I feel your kind remembrance of your friend undersigned, or what delightful associations I shall always connect with the beautiful cigar case before me at this present writing. – Thank you! –
Since I came back2, I have been so overwhelmed by six months of arrears of business, intensely complicated by the illness of Wills,3 that I have been constantly afflicted with a revolving nightmare. I hope however to send round “The Duke’s Motto”4, this next week. I have been here – there – everywhere – and (most of all) nowhere – from the time of my re-beholding Euston Square.5
Ever my Dear Kent
Your truly affectionate Friend
CHARLES DICKENS
- 1. William Charles Mark Kent (always known as Charles) (1823-1902; Dictionary of National Biography), poet and journalist, editor and proprietor of the Sun.
- 2. CD returned to London from his American reading tour on 2 May 1868.
- 3. For W.H. Wills’s incapacitation after a fall from a horse see To Alfred Dickens, 16 May 1868, Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 111.
- 4. Originally The Duke's Daughter; or The Hunchback of Paris, adapted by John Brougham, first performed in England at the Lyceum, 1 Oct 63, with Charles Fechter as the hero; performed as The Duke's Motto in the Grecian Saloon, 18 Jan 64. Perhaps sent for review, but no notice of it appeared in Kent's Sun.
- 5. Euston Square Station was the terminus for the London and North Western Railway, on which CD travelled from Liverpool (where his ship, Russia, had docked on 1 May).