The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To MARY NICHOLS,1 9 MAY 1863

MS Huntington Library.

GAD’S HILL PLACE, | HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.

Saturday Ninth May 1863.

Dear Madam.

I beg to thank you for the opportunity you have given me of reading your paper on myself,2 and for the sincere gratification I have derived from its perusal. I am perfectly sure that it is what you tell me it is—“a heart tribute”—and I assure you from my own heart that I deeply feel and esteem it.

In Mr. Wills’s3 feeling that there would be a kind of impropriety in its appearing in pages under my direction,4 I quite concur. If I thought less highly of your praise, I might have less delicacy on this head.

Will you allow me to enclose you a card, which will admit you on any or all of the five Fridays on which I shall read this season.5 I send you with it my grateful interest and regard.

Dear Madam | Very faithfully Yours

 CHARLES DICKENS

Mrs. Nichols

• 1. Mrs Mary Sargeant Neal Gove Nichols (1810-84; Dictionary of National Biography), American miscellaneous writer, reformer and water-cure practitioner; advocated mesmerism, temperance and dress reform. On becoming a Quaker, married Hiram Gove (1832); met Thomas Low Nichols, 1848 (see Pilgrim Letters 10, p. 385n; 21 Apr 1864) and after a legal separation from Gove, she and Nichols “lived and worked together” (T. L. Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 1887, p. 90), having gone through a Swedenborgian ceremony (July 1848). The Nicholses became Spiritualists, then, ordered by the spirits, Roman Catholics (Nichols, ibid., p. 97). The Nicholses left America on the outbreak of the Civil War (Apr 1861), settling first in London and then (1867-72) in Great Malvern. See further Pilgrim Letters 10, p. 243n.
• 2. Untraced.
• 3. William Henry Wills (1810-80; Dictionary of National Biography), later CD's personal secretary, one of his most trusted friends, and assistant editor of Household Words and All the Year Round.
• 4. I.e. in All the Year Round.
• 5. 15, 22, 29 May; 5, 12 June.