The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To HENRY BURNETT,1 [?1838-9]

MS facsimile of fragment in Unknown Catalogue, June 2006. Date: from handwriting and signature must be before 1840; “Always” in subscription supports after 1837.

…will settle with him in my name.

Henry Burnett Esquire

Always Faithfully Yours 

 CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Henry Burnett (1811-93), singer, music teacher; husband of CD’s sister Fanny (1810-48), whom he met when both were students at the Royal Academy of Music. Their sickly child Henry Jr (d. 1849) was the inspiration for Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol and Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son. Burnett played Squire Norton in CD’s comic operetta The Village Coquettes, and was a member of William Charles Macready’s theatrical company at Covent Garden. He worked as a Professor of Music after moving to Manchester in the early 1840s. Burnett was a prolific author of reminiscences of CD, published after the author’s death; see, for example, “Mr. Henry Burnett’s Reminiscences”, in Frederic G. Kitton, Dickens by Pen and Pencil (London: Frank T. Sabin, 1890), pp. 136-9.