The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To T. W. J. CONNOLLY,1 14 APRIL 18552

MS Hamburger Theatersammlung.

Tavistock House | Saturday Fourteenth April 1855

Sir

I have received your book3 with very great pleasure. The fact of your being its author is most honorable to yourself, and scarcely less so to the service to which you belong. I feel, as your fellow countryman, a personal pride in such a work. Without retaining it longer than one evening, I have sent it (for the present), to a gentleman associated with Household Words; and I have told him he will gratify me4 very much if he will go a little out of his way to write an early account of it.5 I need not say that I leave his judgment perfectly free; but I have sent him at the same time your letter and its enclosure,6 and I am sure he will feel as cordial an interest in the Volumes7 as I do myself.

I am | Faithfully Yours 

CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Thomas William John Connolly, Quartermaster Sergeant of the Royal Sappers and Miners; To W.H. Wills, 4 May 55 confirms the identity. CD and Connolly had been in contact in Feb 52 (Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 588).
• 2. The editors discovered a forgery of this letter, clearly by the “South Coast Forger”: see Pilgrim Letters 7, Preface, p. xv.
• 3. The History of the Corps of Royal Sappers and Miners, 2 vols, 1855.
• 4. Word added above caret.
• 5. Henry Morley’s lead article, “Mechanics in Uniform”, Household Words 2 June 55, XI, 409, gave an enthusiastic account of Connolly’s book and its subject.
• 6. Presumably letter or enclosure included reference to Sir John Fox Burgoyne (1782-1872; Dictionary of National Biography), of the Royal Engineers (in the Crimea, 1853-5; Field-Marshal, 1868), and his recommendation of Connolly’s book for study by Royal Engineers officers (Household Words, XI, 410).
• 7. Connolly’s History was in two volumes.