The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To LEWIS GAYLORD CLARK,1 [?1838-1841]

Extract in Supplement announcing the nineteenth volume (Jan-June 1842) of the Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, p. 3; see below. Date: before the January 1842 issue of the Knickerbocker. CD showed interest in contributing to the magazine at least as early as 1838 (To [Messrs Wiley & Putnam], 31 Aug, Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 430).

I read the Knickerbocker with very great pleasure: it is indeed a most various and entertaining periodical. It will afford me pleasure to contribute to the pages of a work which numbers among its regular correspondents such writers as Washington Irving.2 

• 1. Lewis Gaylord Clark (1808-73; Dictionary of National Biography), editor and controlling proprietor (1834- 60) of the Knickerbocker, 1833-65: Clark made it one of the leading American journals (Pilgrim Letters 1, pp. 431 n.1, 469 n.2). CD later recalled dining with him in America, Feb 42, while reverting to his unfulfilled promise to contribute to the Knickerbocker (To Clark, 2 Mar 43, Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 451). Given Clark's garbling elsewhere of CD’s correspondence (Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 451 n.4), the present extract is quite probably a composite from different sources, including To Messrs Wiley & Putnam, 13 Dec [38], agents in London for the Knickerbocker, where the phrase “which I read with very great pleasure” also occurs (Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 469).
• 2. Washington Irving (1783-1859; Dictionary of American Biography), American author; member of the American Legation in Spain (1826) and London (1829); Minister in Spain, 1842. His works include a comic history of New York, “by Diedrich Knickerbocker” (1809), a pen name he frequently used and taken as title of the magazine, to which he was a frequent contributor; The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1820), which includes “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; and Legends of the Alhambra (1832). Greatly admired by CD: see To Irving, 21 Apr 41 (Pilgrim Letters 2, pp. 267-9).