The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To Isabella Dallas,1 17 OCTOBER 1869

Extract in unidentified Los Angeles catalogue [Nov 2000]; addressed [Mr.] Dallas; dated Gad’s Hill Place, 17 October 1869. Shorter extract (unidentified catalogue at Charles Dickens Museum) gives MS 1p.

How could you possibly be ‘offended’?2 [...] You do not know how difficult it is for me to maintain a correspondence after the day’s work is done. I have lost two Australian mails in succession, in sheer inability to write to my pet boy.3

• 1. Isabella Dallas Glyn (née Gearns) (1823-89; Dictionary of National Biography), actress. Début at Manchester 1847, under her mother's maiden name of Glyn; Sadler's Wells 1848-51. Married twice, the second time (1853) to the critic Eneas Sweetland Dallas (1821-79), to whom CD presented the MS of Our Mutual Friend.
• 2. Presumably Mrs Dallas had taken umbrage that CD had not answered her by return of post.
• 3. Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens (“Plorn”), CD’s youngest and favourite son: he had emigrated to Australia, Oct 1868.