The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To MARY NICHOLS,1 9 AUGUST 18642
MS Huntington Library.
(a) GAD’S HILL PLACE,
HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.
Tuesday Ninth August, 1864
Dear Mrs. Nichols
The chapter of your Unholy Land3 that I had before the receipt of your letter, is in type. The chapter to which you refer in your said letter,4 I have not, because it has (no doubt) gone to Mr. Wills to be entered in the regular book and way of the office. Assuming it to be at the office, I will return it to you at the end of the week. Even though we were not going to run, for some weeks, two serial stories together,5 I should still be indisposed to proceed with this series:- for the reason that I believe your countrymen are not now in the mood to be told anything from this side of the water concerning themselves,6 and that they would unconsciously misrepresent the intention, and that we should do more [than]7 harm than good. (a)
(b) Ben’s Beaver,8 I placed in the last No. I made up. I am much concerned to receive your sad account of your young daughter.9 As you say nothing of your own health, I hope it is better. I am well and working hard.
Faithfully Yours
CHARLES DICKENS
The enclosed very good and true.10 In the passage you have lined out, you anticipate what I would have erased. (b)
- 1. Mrs Mary Sargeant Neal Gove Nichols (1810-84; Dictionary of American Biography), miscellaneous writer, reformer and water-cure practitioner; advocated mesmerism, temperance and dress reform. Published Experience in Water-Cure, New York, 1849, and several novels. With her second husband, Thomas Low Nichols (see Pilgrim Letters, 21 Apr 64, fn), established Nichols' Journal of Health (Cincinnati) 1853, advocating free love, spiritualism and health reform. They published jointly Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results, 1854. Settled in England on outbreak of American Civil War and conducted jointly a water-cure establishment in Great Malvern 1867-75; 1875-86 ed. jointly the London Herald of Health.
- 2. Printed in Pilgrim Letters, following Nonesuch Letters, as two letters, with bb under the date [?16 Aug 64], Pilgrim Letters 10 p. 420.
- 3. Part of the material additional to “A Trip in the Unholy Land” (To Mrs Nichols, 25 July 1863); this chapter renamed by CD “On the Mississippi” (All the Year Round, 27 Aug, XII, 58).
- 4. The chapter most likely, but not certainly, another part of “A Trip”.
- 5. Compare To Mrs Nichols, 25 July 1863. From August, All the Year Round, XII, continued to run Sala’s Quite Alone and began Percy Fitzgerald’s Never Forgotten.
- 6. i.e. during the Civil War.
- 7. Crossed out by CD.
- 8. An account of a Canadian settler’s pet beaver: All the Year Round, 20 Aug, XII, 35.
- 9. Mary Wilhelmina, born 1850; she died in London, aged 14.
- 10. Presumably “Backwoods Life in Canada”, All the Year Round, 1 Oct, XII, 190, named in To Mrs Nichols, 15 Aug.