The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To BARON BRAMWELL,1 2 FEBRUARY 1859

MS Dan Calinescu. Address: Baron Bramwell | 3 Old Palace Yard | Westminster.

TAVISTOCK HOUSE,

TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON. W.C.

Wednesday Second February, 1859.

My Dear Baron Bramwell.

It is with the greatest reluctance and regret, I assure you, that I resign the pleasure of dining with you to day. But I was seized upon, yesterday, by an unusually severe cold in the throat and chest, to which the consideration that I have to read tomorrow evening,2 forces me to attach more importance than I should otherwise bestow upon it. After arguing the matter with myself, with a prolixity worthy of Westminster Hall,3 I am driven to the conclusion that I must get to bed at about your dinner-hour, and be mustard-poulticed and messed and made wretched in a variety of ways. If I went out tonight, I could have no reasonable hope of being fit for tomorrow.

As my daughter4 has not the courage to face the Judicial Presence without paternal support, I take the burden of her excuses on my aching shoulders.

Baron Bramwell

Believe me | Very faithfully Yours  

 CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Sir George William Wilshere Bramwell (1808-92; Dictionary of National Biography), Judge of the Exchequer, 1856; Lord Justice, 1867-81. He had attended The Frozen Deep in London, 14 Jan 57 (To Mrs Brown, 14 Jan 57, Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 260). Bramwell was connected by marriage to Henry Austin; his younger brother, Henry Frith Bramwell, had acted in CD’s amateur production of J. H. Payne’s Clari in1833 (Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 20 & n). This is currently the only known surviving letter to Bramwell.
• 2. CD read the Christmas Carol and The Trial from Pickwick at St Martin’s Hall: one of two readings added to his London Christmas reading programme. On the Thursday, CD wrote to Wilkie Collins, “You have no idea what a cold I have! How I am to read tonight, I don’t know” (Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 24).
• 3. Part of the Palace of Westminster, used from medieval times as a law court; proverbial for legal wordiness. The bachelor lawyer in CD’s “The Ghost of Art” (Household Words, 20 July 50, I, 385) characterizes it as having “too much talk and too much law”: see also Bleak House, ch. 24.
• 4. Presumably Mamie, who as elder daughter would now be CD’s companion when invited out.