The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To SAMUEL CARTER HALL,1 [13 OR 20 MARCH 1839]

Text from facsimile in Freeman's Auction House online catalogue, Sept 2021.

Date: 13 or 20 March (both Wednesdays), shortly before the dinner of the Artists’ General Benevolence Institution.

Doughty Street
Wednesday.

 My Dear Sir

    Thanks for the Art Union2 and the "liberty." I shall be delighted to have you in my party at the Artists' Fund3 — which consists of the enormous number of two, and joins George Cruikshank's.4 I inclose you a ticket to that good end.    

    With kindest regards to Mrs Hall,5 believe me always

        Faithfully Yours
        CHARLES DICKENS

S.C. Hall Esquire

• 1. Samuel Carter Hall (1800-89; Dictionary of National Biography), writer and journalist. Claimed to have known almost every distinguished artist and writer of his day. Had known both CD and his wife Catherine before their marriage, and was present at their son Charley's christening (Retrospect of a Long Life: From 1815 to 1883, vol. 2 [London: Bentley & Son, 1883], p. 156). CD later virtually admitted the popular identification of Hall with Pecksniff, in Martin Chuzzlewit.
• 2. The Art-Union Monthly Journal first appeared in February 1839 (see Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 509); it was edited by Hall, and was the first magazine devoted entirely to the fine and applied arts. It sprang from the London Art Union and adhered to the Union's policy of stimulating interest in art and attacking fraudulent dealers. Bought by Hall in 1840 and in 1849 renamed by him The Art-Journal.
• 3. The 24th annual dinner of the Artists’ General Benevolence Institution took place on Sunday 24 March 1839 at Freemasons’ Hall, and was attended by 162 gentlemen. See notice in William Jerdan’s Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, 16 March 1839, p. 174. CD and George Cruikshank were both stewards, from whom tickets could be purchased for the event at a cost of £1.1s. A report on the event in the Morning Chronicle recorded CD’s response to a toast to “the health of Mr Charles Dickens and the rest of the stewards”; he said that it gave him “sincere gratification to see around him. . . those distinguished artists, who cast lustre by their genius on the lowest subjects, and raised them by the power of their graphic pencils to the level of their own imaginations”. The Chronicle continued: “[Dickens] hoped he would be permitted to say, that it gave him pleasure and delight to be connected even for a moment with an institution which partook of the grace and beauty of the pencil, and shed its soft light upon poverty and distress, into the house of sickness and sorrow” (25 March 1839, p. 3).
• 4. George Cruikshank (1792-1818; Dictionary of National Biography), artist, caricaturist and CD's first illustrator.
• 5. Anna Maria Hall, née Fielding (1800-81; Dictionary of National Biography), sketch writer, novelist, and playwright. Edited and contributed to many journals, and produced some 250 books — novels, poems, children's books, tales and plays. Her popular burletta The French Refugee ran with CD's Is She His Wife? at St James's Theatre in 1837. The Halls collaborated in both their writing and philanthropic activities.