The Charles Dickens Letters Project

Advanced Search

Theme

Correspondent

How to cite:

Individual letter:

Dickens, Charles. To [addressee], [date of letter]. Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship). [URL of individual letter], [date of access].

Database:

Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship), DickensLetters.com.

Find us on social media:

Period:

1861-1870

Theme(s):

public readings

To LADY GEORGIANA PEEL,1 20 APRIL 1869

Replaces extracts in Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 338.

MS R&R Auctions on-line catalogue, 2009.

Blackburn2 | Tuesday Twentieth April | 1869

Dear Lady Georgiana

I am truly obliged to you for your kind invitation, and would with pleasure accept it if I could. But I shall remain in Chester,3 only a few hours: going there rapidly from London, and returning as rapidly to read again.4 I have not seen my own house since Christmas—shall not see it until Midsummer5— could not go to Pembroke Lodge6 at Easter—and have been almost incessantly “Reading” since last October, in all the points of the compass.7

It gives me real gratification to know that you were pleased with my few words of reference to Lord Russell at Liverpool.8 I never can say anywhere how highly I respect and esteem him. I beg to offer my compliments to Mr. Peel,9 and to thank him no less than yourself.

Lady Georgiana Peel.

Believe me | Faithfully Yours

CHARLES DICKENS

1. Georgiana Adelaide Peel (1836-1922); elder daughter by his first wife of Lord John Russell (1792-1878; Dictionary of National Biography), 1st Earl Russell 1861; second wife (1867) of Archibald Peel, grandson of Sir Robert Peel, 1st. Bart, and second cousin to the Prime Minister.
2. CD read at the Exchange Assembly Rooms in Blackburn, 19 Apr, and in Bolton, 20 Apr.
3. The Peels’ home in Royton, Denbighshire, was only 12 miles from Chester; Lady Georgiana had clearly offered CD hospitality. CD’s farewell reading at Chester, fixed for 29 Apr, had been announced in the Chester Guardian on 17 April, but was cancelled on the 24th, along with the rest of the programme for 1869, after CD’s collapse at Preston, 22 Apr (see the Chester Chronicle, 24 Apr, which reprinted in full the certificate from CD's doctor, Francis Carr Beard: see also To Forster, 22 Apr 1869, n3, in Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 340).
4. He read Doctor Marigold and the Trial from Pickwick in the Temperance Hall, Bolton, that night. In a warm review, the Bolton Chronicle, 24 Apr 1869, commented that near the close CD's voice "appeared somewhat to fail him", and he abridged the Trial by omitting Serjeant Snubbin's speech.
5. From 6 January, CD had been either on his reading tour or based at the All the Year Round Office on brief returns to London.
6. Earl Russell’s out-of-town home in Richmond Park since 1847.
7. For a detailed listing of CD's public readings on his Farewell Tour see Malcolm Andrews, Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 286-90.
8. On 10 April, at the Liverpool banquet in CD's honour, he remarked: "there is no man in England whom I respect more in his public capacity, whom I love more in his private capacity, or from whom I have received more remarkable proofs of his honour and love of literature than . . . Lord Russell" (The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K.J. Fielding [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960], pp. 388-9).
9. Archibald Peel (1828-1910), Lady Georgiana's husband (married 1867), and nephew of Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850; Prime Minister 1841-6).