The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To JOSEPH JONES,1 8 MARCH [1842]

Facsimile in Between the Covers Rare Books online catalogue, October 2013, in third person.

                                       UNITED STATES HOTEL,2

March 8^th

Mr. Charles Dickens presents his compliments to Mr. Joseph Jones and begs through him to thank the Committee of the Hibernian Society,3 for their polite attention and kind invitation. It would have given Mr. Dickens great pleasure to accept it, but he leaves this city4 tomorrow morning and will be at [a]5 considerable distance from it on the seventeenth.

• 1. Joseph Stevens Jones, (d. 1877), Boston actor, playwright, and theatre manager, who dramatised Samuel Warren’s Ten Thousand a Year. See Pilgrim Letters 2, p. 202n.
• 2. In Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.
• 3. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish Catholic fraternal organisation; its American branch was founded in New York City in 1833.
• 4. Philadelphia, where CD stayed from 5-9 March, before moving on to Washington.
• 5. Word probably missing through a tear in the page.