The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To JOHN HENRY CHAMBERLAIN,1 17 NOVEMBER 1869

Extract in Nonesuch Letters, III, 751.

MS (envelope only) Owen Jenkins. Address: John Henry Chamberlain Esquire | Birmingham and Midland Institute | Birmingham. PM 17 Nov 69.

Gad’s Hill Place

17th November, 1869

I send you the Speech corrected.2

The enigmatical concluding sentence would (I think) never have had any mystery about it, if its proper capital letters, according to my emphasis, had been printed thus:-

My faith in the people

governing is on the whole infinitesimal;

my faith in The People governed is,

on the whole, illimitable.3

• 1. John Henry Chamberlain (1831-83), Hon. Secretary, Birmingham and Midland Institute; architect: see Pilgrim Letters 12, pp. 279-80.
• 2. CD’s speech as Chairman of the Institute, at the Annual Inaugural Meeting on 27 Sep; he had agreed to its publication by the Council and offered to correct the proofs: see Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K. J. Fielding, 1960, p. 435.
• 3. The speech, which embodied CD’s ‘political creed’ had been published in the press without the capital letters and had been widely criticised for what was seen as his ‘antiliberalism’: see Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K. J. Fielding, 1960, p. 419.