The Charles Dickens Letters Project

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How to cite:

Individual letter:

Dickens, Charles. To [addressee], [date of letter]. Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship). [URL of individual letter], [date of access].

Database:

Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship), DickensLetters.com.

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Period:

1841-1850

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charity

celebrity

To THOMAS CROFTON CROKER,1 13 NOVEMBER 1849

Text from facsimile on eBay, October 2015.

Devonshire Terrace

Thirteenth November 1849.

Tuesday Evening.

My Dear Sir

I am most unfortunate in the filling-up of that important blank2 in your kind note. For on Wednesday the 21st I preside at the public dinner of the Newsvenders’3 Benevolent Institution,4 and (for that day) there is no other hope in me.

Believe me

Very faithfully Yours

CHARLES DICKENS

T. Crofton Croker Esquire.

1. Thomas Crofton Croker (1798–1854) Irish antiquarian, and specialist in Irish fairy tales; clerk at the Admiralty 1818-50 and Registrar of the Literary Fund Society 1837–54.
2. In connection with an appeal, which CD had decided to support, to the Literary Fund on behalf of Wilmington Fleming. See To Wilmington Fleming, [?24] October [1838], Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 444.
3. Thus in MS.
4. Newsvendors’ Benevolent Institution, a charity founded in 1839 in support of workers in the newspaper industry. CD was president from 1854 until his death in 1870.