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):

friends

charity

Ireland

To LADY OLLIFFE,1 6 APRIL 1861

Extract in J. A. Stargardt, Berlin catalogue, 2004; MS 1 p.; dated 3 Hanover Terrace, 6 April 61; addressed Lady Olliffe.

I send you a little fan today which I hope you will like—if not for its sake, for mine. I tried one with the legend, in spangles, “I am not the Humbug some people call me”—but it didn’t look well!2 I am very sorry to tell you that in the awful confiscation of private papers that always goes on here, the total papers from Cork3 were destroyed. I hope you will get Olliffe’s forgiveness for me. He had described their contents as they concerned his good brother4 with such astonishing exactness, that he can’t want them.

1. Lady Olliffe (1823-98;née Laura Cubitt); daughter of Sir William Cubitt MP (1791-1863). Wife of Sir Joseph Olliffe (1808-69; Dictionary of National Biography), physician to the British Embassy in Paris.
2. Clearly a running joke between CD and Lady Olliffe (compare To Lady Olliffe, 26 May 61, Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 421), though probably symptomatic of CD’s increasing awareness of charges of humbug and lachrymose sentiment directed against him in the 1850s and 1860s. In April 1851, when CD chaired the General Theatrical Fund dinner (the night his daughter Dora died) and Forster, proposing his health, declared that CD’s “practical philanthropy was ever palpable”, someone had “cried out ‘Humbug!’” (Daily News, 15 April 51, quoted in The Speeches of CD, ed. K.J.Fielding, 1960, p.124). This hostility was to find open expression in the tributes to Thackeray (early 1864), who was contrasted with “writers of the Gushing School” (Pilgrim Letters 10, p. 347n).
3. The subject of the papers not traced; some parts were found (To Olliffe, [13] Apr 61 and To Lady Olliffe, 13 Apr 61 (Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 403).
4. Henry B. Olliffe, J.P., Secretary to Cork, Blackrock & Passage Railway Co., of Mount Verdon House, 66 Summer Hill, Cork. He had offered hospitality when CD visited the city on his 1858 reading tour: see Pilgrim Letters 8, p.637.