The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To FLORENCE ROSS CHURCH,1 29 MARCH 1869

MS The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND,

Monday Twenty Ninth March 1869

My Dear Mrs. Ross Church

Let me assure you that I very highly esteem the honour you propose to render me, and that I truly feel the terms in which it is proffered. I accept it with all my heart.2

Unfortunately it is quite out of my power to make any safe appointment for any day in the next month or in May. My “Farewell Readings” (which will not be finished until June), keep me perpetually travelling in all parts of the Empire; and within a few hours of my being brought back to London to read there, I am spirited away again, at the cost of immense fatigue, to read elsewhere. This will go on until the appointed list is read out. 

Believe me always | Very faithfully Yours

  CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. née Florence Marryat (1838-99; Dictionary of National Biography), daughter of Capt. Frederick Marryat (1792-1848; Dictionary of National Biography); married Thomas Ross Church, June 54; prolific novelist, playwright, actress and singer: see Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 67 and later vols.
• 2. Her new novel, Véronique: A Romance, dedicated to CD; copy at Gad’s Hill on CD’s death (Catalogue of the Library of CD, ed. J. H. Stonehouse): see Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 406 and n, where part of her dedicatory letter is quoted.