The Charles Dickens Letters Project
TO GEORGE DOLBY,1 17 FEBRUARY 1869
Replaces extract
Facsimile in Profiles in History catalogue, May 2013
Great Western Hotel2
Wednesday Seventeenth February 1869
My Dear Dolby
I was in severe pain all last night, and Scott3 (the best of nurses) poulticed and fermented the unhappy foot, all the night through. It had looked in the evening as though it were taking a decided turn for the better; but it came out afterwards as I tell you.
I am so clouded to day by opium and Beard’s4 other medicines, that I hardly know which part of the general confusion is foot, and which head. But I think5 the inflammation is subsiding.
Of the probabilities as to Saturday,6 I can as yet say nothing. You know how earnestly I hope to get sword in hand again that soon, and fight it out. You shall hear again by tomorrow night’s post how I go on. I am as restless as if I were behind bars in the Zoological Gardens; and if I could afford it, would wear a part of my mane away, as the lion has done, by rubbing against the windows of my cage.
Ever affectionately
CD.
- 1. George Dolby (d. 1900), CD’s reading tour manager from 1866.
- 2. In Conduit St East, Paddington.
- 3. Henry Scott, CD’s valet and dresser.
- 4. Francis Carr Beard (1814-93), FRCS, CD’s regular physician from 1859; youngest brother of CD’s lifelong friend Thomas Beard.
- 5. Doubly underlined.
- 6. For the first of his farewell readings in Edinburgh, the Scotsman, 18 Feb, announced that they were postponed to 24 and 26 Feb (with no third reading) because of his inflamed foot.