The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To RICHARD BENTLEY,1 16 JULY 1866

MS Jane Brousseau

Address: Richard Bentley Esquire | New Burlington Street | London | W

GAD'S HILL PLACE,
HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.
Monday Sixteenth July, 1866

My Dear Mr Bentley,

    I send you many thanks for Miss Eden's book,2 and for your kind remembrance.

            Faithfully Yours

            CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Richard Bentley (1794-1871; Dictionary of National Biography), prominent Victorian publisher, founder of Richard Bentley & Son. See further Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 164n. CD entered into agreement with Bentley (1836) for a novel (eventually to be Barnaby Rudge) and edited Bentley’s Miscellany, Jan 1837-Jan 1839. For the often difficult professional relationship between CD and Bentley, see Robert L. Patten, CD and His Publishers, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018) pp. 57-66.
• 2. Most likely novelist and traveller the Hon. Emily Eden's "Up the Country": Letters Written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India (2 vols., London: Richard Bentley, 1866). It was reviewed favourably in the Athenaeum for its nostalgic but realistic picture of a life in India under British rule in the 1830s (30 June 1866, p. 857). When in India with her brother, 1st Earl of Auckland, Eden had discovered CD's early work, partly in pirated editions, and wrote enthusiastically to her sister about it: e.g. in Feb 1839, "'Oliver Twist' we have read . . . and I like it very much--but 'Nicholas Nickleby' still better. . . . There never was such a man as Dickens! I often think of proposing a public subscription for him. . . . He is the agent for Europe fun" ("Up the Country", vol. 2, pp. 75-6).