The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To EDMUND YATES,1 20 OCTOBER 1865 

Text from facsimile in Boisgirard-Antonini online catalogue, June 2016. 

OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND

Friday Twentieth October 1865 

My Dear E.Y.

I congratulate you on having run the gauntlet. Short work in the time! I have not yet had leisure to read it,2 but am just going to do so. 

Early in November – the first week of November – I shall probably be here for two or three days, over the Xmas No.3 I will give you notice of the time I suggest for an appointment, as soon as I can telescopically discern it. 

Ever

CD. 

• 1. Edmund Yates (1831-94; Dictionary of National Biography), journalist and novelist. Son of the actors Frederick Henry (see Pilgrim Letters 2, p. 10n) and Elizabeth Yates (née Brunton); educated at Highgate School and in Germany; entered the Post Office 1847, the Head of Missing Letters 1862, retired 1872. Member of the Garrick Club, Dec 1848. Married Louisa Katherine Wilkinson 1853. Met CD in 1854 and became a close friend and protégé. Contributor to Household Words and All the Year Round.
• 2. Unidentified. Possibly a plot outline for Yates’s novel Black Sheep!, which ran in All the Year Round from 25 Aug 1866 to 30 March 1867.
• 3. The Christmas number of All the Year Round, featuring ‘Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions’.