The Charles Dickens Letters Project

 To WILLIAM COX BENNETT,1 12 OCTOBER 1858

 MS Jerome P. O’Connor.

 OFFICE OF HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

Tuesday Twelfth October 1858

My Dear Sir

Will you be so good as to send a competent person down to my house at Gad’s Hill […]2 to Doctor the clock.3 It has suddenly left off striking—to the great discomfiture of my establishment.

W. Bennett Esquire

Faithfully Yours

 CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. William Cox Bennett (1820-95; Dictionary of National Biography), miscellaneous writer and watch- and clockmaker; younger brother of John Bennett (1814-97; Dictionary of National Biography), watch- and clockmaker of 65 Cheapside, with whom he worked. The brothers (born in Greenwich) founded the Greenwich Society for the Acquisition and Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. William Bennett had published poems in Household Words.
• 2. A word (possibly “and”) deleted by CD.
• 3. Presumably the clock now in the Charles Dickens Museum, made by “Bennett, Cheapside, London”; it needed the Bennetts’ attention on several occasions (see e.g. Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 493 & n; Pilgrim Letters 9, pp. 45-6).