The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To SIR ALEXANDER DUFF GORDON,1 29 SEPTEMBER 1857

MS Huntington Library.

Gad’s Hill

Tuesday Twenty Ninth September 1857

My Dear Gordon

Many thanks for your note, received here this morning. I wish the book were Lady Gordon’s!2 But I am afraid that a translation from M. De Wailly3—of a book appearing in a serial form in Paris—would not do for Household Words.4

Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.

With kind regard | Alwys Faithfully Yours

 CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Sir Alexander Cornewall Duff Gordon (1811-72), 3rd Baronet; civil servant. Educated at Eton; Clerk in the Treasury; Senior Clerk 1854; Commissioner of Inland Revenue 1856; an Assistant Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber. Translated some works from German. He and his wife Lucy (see below) were at the centre of a progressive literary and social circle, which included CD, William Makepeace Thackeray, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Kinglake, Caroline Norton, and distinguished visiting foreigners.
• 2. Lady Duff Gordon, née Lucie [Lucy] Austin (1821-69; Dictionary of National Biography), author and translator. Married Duff Gordon, 1840: see further Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 44n and Supplement IX, Dickensian (104), Summer 2008, p. 146n.
• 3. Armand François Léon DeWailly; novelist, and translator from English: see Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 508n.
• 4. Lady Duff Gordon had translated an earlier novel of De Wailly’s (Stella and Vanessa: A Romance, 1850); no later translation by her of De Wailly appeared.